Information Visualization and Machine Learning Applied on Static Code Analysis

Software engineers will possibly never see the perfect source code in their lifetime, but they are seeing much better analysis tools for finding defects in software. The approaches used in static code analysis emerged from simple code crawling to usage of statistical and probabilistic frameworks. This work presents a new technique that incorporates machine learning and information visualization into static code analysis. The technique learns patterns in a program’s source code using a normalized compression distance and applies them to classify code fragments into faulty or correct. Since the classification frequently is not perfect, the training process plays an essential role. A visualization element is used in the hope that it lets the user better understand the inner state of the classifier making the learning process transparent. An experimental evaluation is carried out in order to prove the efficacy of an implementation of the technique, the Code Distance Visualizer. The outcome of the evaluation indicates that the proposed technique is reasonably effective in learning to differentiate between faulty and correct code fragments, and the visualization element enables the user to discern when the tool is correct in its output and when it is not, and to take corrective action (further training or retraining) interactively, until the desired level of performance is reached