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by btilly
4230 days ago
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I remember reading an article a few years ago from, if I remember correctly, Coverity. One of their challenges for customer acceptance was that many organizations write invalid code that is preprocessed in custom ways. This means that Coverity can't understand the code to analyze it. In all cases, the default customer result is to say that the tool is useless. Doubly so if the invalid bit is buried deep in the system where few of the developers go. To compensate, they had to build a robust capacity to recognize invalid syntax, and work around it to analyze the parts that they could analyze. The described block rewriting extension is a perfect example of what threw them. Another amusing challenge that they encountered is that they could correctly report on complex race conditions, but the developers who created those race conditions tended not to understand the problem reports. The result is that the engineer would wrongly become confident that the tool was crap. The "solution" was to deliberately not report provable bugs! If this is enough to trigger anyone else's memory of an article that was going around 4 or 5 years ago, I'd love to read it again. :-) |
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