Poster: Memory and Resource Leak Defects in Java Projects: An Empirical Study

Despite many software engineering efforts and programming language support, resource and memory leaks remain a troublesome issue in managed languages such as Java. Understanding the properties of leak-related issues, such as their type distribution, how they are found, and which defects induce them is an essential prerequisite for designing better approaches for avoidance, diagnosis, and repair of leak-related bugs. To answer these questions, we conduct an empirical study on 452 issues found in repositories of 10 mature Apache Java projects.