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by ken 2435 days ago
I'm confused. It should be easy to demonstrate the benefit, if there is one. Just show them the bugs!

For me, it's not "status anxiety". It's simply not worth the effort.

The last couple static analysis tools I ran on my programs, I spent a while getting the tool to not-crash (because even though the authors obviously had a static analysis tool themselves, they either didn't bother to run it on their own code, or it wasn't good enough to find actual issues). These tools flagged only a couple issues, and almost all of them were places where it couldn't really cause any problems, but the type system was not strong enough for me to prove why it couldn't go bad. So I spent a while sorting through false-positives.

I'm not going to spend hours with a tool to find only a couple (real) bugs, which no user has ever reported seeing, and which I've gotten no automated crash reports about. I have much better uses for my time.

1 comments

See, that's another thing that a lot of people don't understand about static analysis. It's not just there to find bugs in existing code, it's there to find bugs as you write or edit the code! Of course it won't find a lot in a tested code base. It's tested after all. But it immensely shortens debug time as you develop, and thus reduces testing time as well.