Efficiency of bug finding tools for refactoring prediction

Bugs and defects present in software are very difficult to detect and repair. Many static analysis tools have been designed and developed to find bugs automatically at early stages helping in producing a reliable software and that too at a very low cost. This is done by analyzing source code at the compile time. Empirical evaluation is performed to depict the usefulness of Automated Static analysis tools. In this study, we evaluate potential defects that were evaluated by tools, specifically PMD[7] and Findbugs[5] on miscellaneous software projects written in java and their analysis with the refactoring results given by the tool LSdiff. By using different tools, we can cross check the warnings and bug reports given by them. The results by our experiments show that these tools also sometimes misclassify nonbugs as bugs termed as false positives.