Sorald: Automatic Patch Suggestions for SonarQube Static Analysis Violations

Previous work has shown that early resolution of issues detected by static code analyzers can prevent major costs later on. However, developers often ignore such issues for two main reasons. First, many issues should be interpreted to determine if they correspond to actual flaws in the program. Second, static analyzers often do not present the issues in a way that is actionable. To address these problems, we present
Sorald
: a novel system that uses metaprogramming templates to transform the abstract syntax trees of programs and suggests fixes for static analysis warnings. Thus, the burden on the developer is reduced from interpreting and fixing static issues, to inspecting and approving full fledged solutions.
Sorald
automatically fixes violations of 10 rules of
SonarQube
, a single Java static analyzer that is among the mostly used. We evaluate
Sorald
on a dataset of 161 popular repositories on
Github
. Our analysis shows the effectiveness of
Sorald
as it fixes 65% (852/1,307) of the violations that meets the repair preconditions. Overall, our experiments show it is possible to automatically fix notable violations of the static analysis rules produced by the state-of-the-art static analyzer
SonarQube
.