TY - CONF T1 - Improving software quality with static analysis T2 - Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT workshop on Program analysis for software tools and engineering Y1 - 2007 A1 - Foster, Jeffrey S. A1 - Hicks, Michael W. A1 - Pugh, William KW - bug patterns KW - bugs KW - C KW - Data races KW - FFIs KW - java KW - modularity KW - network protocols KW - Software quality AB - At the University of Maryland, we have been working to improve the reliability and security of software by developing new, effective static analysis tools. These tools scan software for bug patterns or show that the software is free from a particular class of defects. There are two themes common to our different projects: 1. Our ultimate focus is on utility: can a programmer actually improve the quality of his or her software using an analysis tool? The important first step toward answering this question is to engineer tools so that they can analyze existing, nontrivial programs, and to carefully report the results of such analyses experimentally. The desire to better understand a more human-centered notion of utility underlies much of our future work. 2. We release all of our tools open source. This allows other researchers to verify our results, and to reuse some or all of our implementations, which often required significant effort to engineer. We believe that releasing source code is important for accelerating the pace of research results software quality, and just as importantly allows feedback from the wider community. In this research group presentation, we summarize some recent work and sketch future directions. JA - Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT workshop on Program analysis for software tools and engineering T3 - PASTE '07 PB - ACM CY - New York, NY, USA SN - 978-1-59593-595-3 UR - http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1251535.1251549 M3 - 10.1145/1251535.1251549 ER -