Characterising, Explaining, and Exploiting the Approximate Nature of StaticAnalysis through.pdfVIP

Characterising, Explaining, and Exploiting the Approximate Nature of Static Analysis through Animation David Binkley Mark Harman Jens Krinke Loyola College King’s College London FernUniversitat in Hagen ¨ Baltimore MD Strand, London 58084 Hagen 21210-2699, USA. WC2R 2LS, UK. Germany. Abstract In addition, as an ‘experimental curiosity’, an example of one of the animations is available on the upper right hand This paper addresses the question: “How can animated corner of the paper as a flick-book animation. For optimal visualisation be used to express interesting properties of performance, this flick-book animation should be viewed static analysis?” The particular focus is upon static depen- on a single-sided version of the paper, though it renders dence analysis, but the approach adopted in the paper is adequately on the double-sided version of the paper in the applicable to other forms of static analysis. The challenge proceedings. Flicking through the page corners from front is twofold. First, there is the inherent difficultly of using to back reveals the animation that is used in the example animation, which is inherently dynamic, as a representa- discussed in Section 4.2. In the electronic form, repeated tion of static analysis, which is not. The paper shows one clicking on ‘next page’ also should give an impression of way in which this apparent contrad