Assessing the precision of FindBugs by mining Java projects developed at a university

Assessing the precision of FindBugs by mining Java projects developed at a university Software repositories are analyzed to extract useful information on software characteristics. One of them is external quality. A technique used to increase software quality is automatic static analysis, by means of bug finding tools. These tools promise to speed up the verification of source code; anyway, there are still many problems, especially the high number of false positives, that hinder their large adoption in software development industry. We studied the capability of a popular bug-finding tool, FindBugs, for defect prediction purposes, analyzing the issues revealed on a repository of universityJava projects. Particularly, we focused on the percentage of them that indicates actual defects with respect to their category and priority, and we ranked them. We found that a very limited set of issues have high precision and therefore have a positive impact on code external quality.