[pl-seminar] Path Projection for User-Centered Static Analysis

[Ben Liblit <liblit@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Please join us this Tuesday for a summertime PL seminar talk by 
Professor Jeff Foster from the University of Maryland!
--- Tuesday, August 12 ---
3:30 pm, 3310 CS (Cookies: 3:00 pm, 3310 CS)
Jeff Foster, University of Maryland
"Path Projection for User-Centered Static Analysis"

The research and industrial communities have made great strides in 
developing sophisticated defect detection tools based on static 
analysis.  To date most of the work in this area has focused on 
developing novel static analysis algorithms, but has neglected study of 
other aspects of static analysis tools, particularly user interfaces. 
In this work, we present a novel user interface toolkit called Path 
Projection that helps users visualize, navigate, and understand program 
paths, a common component of many tools' error reports.  We performed a 
controlled user study to measure the benefit of Path Projection in 
triaging error reports from Locksmith, a data race detection tool for C. 
 We found that Path Projection improved participants' time to complete 
this task, without affecting accuracy, while participants felt Path 
Projection was useful and strongly preferred it to a more standard viewer.
Joint work with Yit Phang Khoo, Mike Hicks, and Vibha Sazawal.