On the Benefit of Automated Static Analysis for Small and Medium-Sized Software Enterprises
This addresses quality assurance efficiency for SMEs, but it is incremental as it applies existing static analysis techniques to a specific context.
The study tackled the challenge of quality assurance for small and medium-sized software enterprises (SMEs) by evaluating automated static analysis techniques, finding that introducing these methods required minimal effort (mostly below one person-hour) and effectively detected diverse defects in production code, leading companies to adopt them.
Today's small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the software industry are faced with major challenges. While having to work efficiently using limited resources they have to perform quality assurance on their code to avoid the risk of further effort for bug fixes or compensations. Automated static analysis can reduce this risk because it promises little effort for running an analysis. We report on our experience in analysing five projects from and with SMEs by three different static analysis techniques: code clone detection, bug pattern detection and architecture conformance analysis. We found that the effort that was needed to introduce those techniques was small (mostly below one person-hour), that we can detect diverse defects in production code and that the participating companies perceived the usefulness of the presented techniques as well as our analysis results high enough to include the techniques in their quality assurance.