How Good is Static Analysis at Finding Concurrency Bugs?

Detecting bugs in concurrent software is challenging due to the many different thread interleavings. Dynamic analysis and testing solutions to bug detection are often costly as they need to provide coverage of the interleaving space in addition to traditional black box or white box coverage. An alternative to dynamic analysis detection of concurrency bugs is the use of static analysis. This paper examines the use of three static analysis tools (Find Bugs, J Lint and Chord) in order to assess each tool's ability to find concurrency bugs and to identify the percentage of spurious results produced. The empirical data presented is based on an experiment involving 12 concurrent Java programs.