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On Leveraging Tests to Infer Nullable Annotations

Authors Jens Dietrich , David J. Pearce , Mahin Chandramohan

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Author Details

Jens Dietrich
  • Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
David J. Pearce
  • ConsenSys, Wellington, New Zealand
Mahin Chandramohan
  • Oracle Labs, Brisbane, Australia

Funding

  • Dietrich, Jens: The first author was supported by Oracle Labs, Australia.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Chris Povirk for his feedback on using our tool on guava, and Görel Hedin for assisting us to set up the experiment reported in Section 7.9.

Cite AsGet BibTex

Jens Dietrich, David J. Pearce, and Mahin Chandramohan. On Leveraging Tests to Infer Nullable Annotations. In 37th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 263, pp. 10:1-10:25, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2023.10

Abstract

Issues related to the dereferencing of null pointers are a pervasive and widely studied problem, and numerous static analyses have been proposed for this purpose. These are typically based on dataflow analysis, and take advantage of annotations indicating whether a type is nullable or not. The presence of such annotations can significantly improve the accuracy of null checkers. However, most code found in the wild is not annotated, and tools must fall back on default assumptions, leading to both false positives and false negatives. Manually annotating code is a laborious task and requires deep knowledge of how a program interacts with clients and components. We propose to infer nullable annotations from an analysis of existing test cases. For this purpose, we execute instrumented tests and capture nullable API interactions. Those recorded interactions are then refined (santitised and propagated) in order to improve their precision and recall. We evaluate our approach on seven projects from the spring ecosystems and two google projects which have been extensively manually annotated with thousands of @Nullable annotations. We find that our approach has a high precision, and can find around half of the existing @Nullable annotations. This suggests that the method proposed is useful to mechanise a significant part of the very labour-intensive annotation task.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Software defect analysis
  • Software and its engineering → Software reliability
  • Software and its engineering → Dynamic analysis
Keywords
  • null analysis
  • null safety
  • testing
  • program analysis

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Supplementary Materials

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