Building a Framework to Improve the User Experience of Static Analysis Tools

Static analysis tools are an important technique that helps in the de-velopment of secure code by analyzing code and reporting potential errors to developers. Besides the technical challenges of developing sophisticated static analyses, research, however, has also shown that static analysis tools often do not address the tools' usability sufficiently. Such usability issues existing in static analysis tools can inhibit the acceptance in practice by developers or might even lead to the tool's dismissal. To address this, we aim to help improve the user experience for developers using static analysis tools. We investigated several fundamentals to develop and properly evaluate usability interventions. Those fundamentals namely are the Foundations on the origin of API misuse (F1), the State of the art of static analysis tool usability (F2), and the Evaluation of static analysis tool accuracy (F3). Combining these fundamentals, we propose a theoretical frame-work to develop usability interventions for static analysis tools and then evaluate them. In this paper we discuss our research contri-bution to each fundamental respectively and how we believe the resulting framework can be employed to improve the user experi-ence of static analysis tools.