What the Fix? A Study of ASATs Rule Documentation

Abstract: Automatic Static Analysis Tools (ASATs) are widely used by software developers to diffuse and enforce coding practices. Yet, we know little about the documentation of ASATs, despite it being critical to learn about the coding practices in the first place. We shed light on this through several contributions. First, we analyze the documentation of more than 100 rules of 16 ASATs for multiple programming languages, and distill a taxonomy of the purposes of the documentation-What triggers a rule; Why it is important; and how to Fix an issue-and its types of contents. Then, we conduct a survey to assess the effectiveness of the documentation in terms of its goals and types of content. We highlight opportunities for improvement in ASAT documentation. In particular, we find that the Why purpose is missing in half of the rules we survey; moreover, when the Why is present, it is more likely to have quality issues than the What and the Fix.