Empirical Assessment of the Impact of Automatic Static Analysis on Code Quality

Background: Automatic static analysis (ASA) is performed on source code with different goals: improve important characteristics of code (such as maintainability), check a standard compliance or detect possible defects; therefore a substantial impact of ASA on software quality is expected. However, many problems related to their usage, especially the high number of false positives and the absence of evidence on their impact on code quality, could easily hinder the potential benefits of such tools. Aims: Assess the impact of ASA issues (detections of ASA tools) on code quality by means of empirical analyses and controlled experiments on different software contexts. Method: Goal Question Metric approach is used. Two main goals are defined: 1) Assess the precision of ASA issue