Static analysis on integration level

Abstract

Static analysis on integration level is a method of checking the usage of interfaces between software modules (function calls and global variables) without executing the software system. The interfaces are analyzed by a tool without referencing an interface specification or documented software architecture. An interface is classified as suspicious if it is neither written nor read, if it is globally defined but only used locally, or not used at all. In a tool supported analysis, all suspicious interfaces are collected and then evaluated for their validity within the context of a formal review. Invalid findings may result from pointer accesses, future development plans or unused interfaces which are provided by a library component. The static analysis on integration level was executed on a small embedded system pre-development project written in C. The results show - although the number of invalid findings is relatively high - findings which would not have been found by another test method.