Static analysis is the process of analyzing source code for the purpose of finding bugs and evaluating code quality without the need to execute it.
Developers and testers can run static analysis on partially complete code, libraries, and third-party source code. In the application security domain, static analysis goes by the term static application security testing (SAST).
Static code analyzers use a compiler-like front-end to build a syntactic and semantic model of the software. The syntactic model is then analyzed against a set of rules or “checkers” to see if the code is in violation. These checkers use pattern-matching algorithms to detect errors including:
Static analysis is highly recommended or required by some companies building applications to safety standards like ISO 26262, DO-178C, IEC 62304, IEC 61508, and EN 50128. It helps organizations detect hard-to-find defects and improve software safety, security, and reliability by conforming to coding standards such as MISRA, AUTOSAR C++ 14, CERT, CWE, OWASP, and others.
Static analysis is the process of examining source without the need for execution for the purposes of finding bugs or evaluating code quality. This means that developers and testers can run static analysis on partially complete code, libraries, and third-party source code. In the application security domain, static analysis goes by the term static application security testing (SAST).
Looks for code patterns that violate defined coding rules. In addition to ensuring that code meets uniform expectations for regulatory compliance or internal initiatives, it also helps teams prevent defects like resource leaks, performance and security issues, logical errors, and API misuse.
Involves finding and analyzing the various paths that can be taken through the code both by control (the order in which lines can be executed) and by data (the sequences in which a variable or similar entity can be created, changed, used and destroyed). This can expose problems that lead to critical defects such as memory corruptions (buffer overwrites), memory access violations, null pointer dereferences, race conditions or deadlocks. It can also detect security issues by pointing out paths that bypass security-critical code, for example, code that performs authentication or encryption.
Involves measuring and visualizing various aspects of the code. It can help detect existing defects, but more often it warns of potential difficulty in preventing and detecting future defects when code is maintained. This is done by finding complexity and unwieldiness such as:
Checking for duplicate code helps organizations improve application design and decrease maintenance costs. During this type of analysis, code is parsed into smaller language elements (tokens). The tokens are analyzed according to a set of rules that specify what should be considered duplicate code. There two types of rules:
Static code analysis tools assess, compile, and check for vulnerabilities and security flaws to analyze code under test. A state-of-the-art tool can apply a checker to find issues, violations, and vulnerabilities in the code. With a comprehensive set of static code analysis techniques — pattern-based analysis, dataflow analysis, abstract interpretation, metrics, and more — you can verify code quality with a substantial number of checkers. Meanwhile, you can provide actionable workflows to help your team reduce noise, prioritize findings, and fix defects in the code.
Specialized bug finders like null pointer dereference, division by zero, memory leaks, and others are also supported. Create custom rule configurations to suit your project or company needs or opt to adopt the rules that are grouped into predefined configurations.
“MISRA”, “MISRA C” and the triangle logo are registered trademarks of The MISRA Consortium Limited. ©The MISRA Consortium Limited, 2021. All rights reserved.
For safety and security-critical applications, a solution that’s been certified by a TÜV certification authority such as TÜV SÜD for use on safety-critical systems for monitoring static analysis coding standards like MISRA and AUTOSAR C++ 14.
A compliance summary report that documents the state of compliance for each guideline and any other associated deviations or recategorization.
Supports 2500+ different rules that cover industry coding standards such as AUTOSAR C++ 14, MISRA, JSF, CERT, CWE, and more.
Prevent code defects early in any development process before they turn into more expensive challenges in the later stages of software testing.
Usher in static analysis solutions that are recommended by process standards such as ISO 26262, DO-178C, IEC 62304, IEC 61508, EN 50128, and more.
Weave compliance with security coding standards like SEI CERT, CWE, OWASP, DISA-ASD-STIG, and UL 2900 into the SA testing processes and to be certain that your code meets stringent security standards.
Establish compliance with safety coding standards such as MISRA, AUTOSAR C++ 14, JSF, and more, or create your own custom coding standards configuration for your organization.
Easily integrate static analysis into your streamlined CI/CD pipeline with continuous testing that quickly delivers high-quality software.
Incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve productivity in your team’s static analysis workflow. The AI will flag and prioritize the most urgent violations that need to be fixed first.
View results in Parasoft’s dynamic reporting dashboard and automate post-processing and advanced reporting strategies using historical data. You can even see the results when working with large codebases and legacy code where visibility into the code is typically challenging. That means you can quickly focus on the quality of the newly-added code.
What environment is your development team working in? Parasoft solutions support a comprehensive set of development ecosystems to integrate into an extensive list of IDE products to conduct static analysis for C, C++, Java, C#, and VB.NET. Give your team of programmers the automation tools it needs to perform the source code analysis for quality. Protect your organization with static application security testing. Search for application coding flaws, back doors, or analyze any other security vulnerabilities that can put your organization or customers at risk or susceptible to attack. Parasoft’s tools are available for these programming languages.
Perform static analysis, unit testing, and code coverage to develop high-quality C and C++ code that is robust, safe, secure, and compliant with industry standards.
Request Demo Perform static analysis, unit testing, and code coverage to develop high-quality C and C++ code that is robust, safe, secure, and compliant with industry standards.
C/C++test is made for today’s high-velocity Agile DevOps environments. It integrates tightly into your CI/CD pipeline and containerized deployments.
Cut down on labor, costs and expedite time to market by automating compliance verification and validation demands, including reports and audit trail.
Parasoft’s AI/ML solution reviews static analysis findings, then organizes, predicts relevance, and prioritizes code violation findings.
Achieve static code analysis, unit testing, and high code coverage with JUnit to accelerate the delivery of secure and reliable Java applications.
Get a complete view of quality and compliance with aggregated reports and advanced analytics across Parasoft testing solutions.
Achieve static code analysis, unit testing, and high code coverage with JUnit to accelerate the delivery of secure and reliable Java applications.
Start Free Trial Achieve static code analysis, unit testing, and high code coverage with JUnit to accelerate the delivery of secure and reliable Java applications.
Jtest integrates tightly into your CI/CD pipeline for real-time static analysis, unit testing, and code coverage testing.
Jtest users can easily generate, augment, and reuse unit tests with AI assistance, reducing costs and time.
Jtest provides code coverage compliance and visibility into what code has been tested and how thoroughly.
Perform static analysis, unit testing, and code coverage to develop high-quality C and C++ code that is robust, safe, secure, and compliant with industry standards.
Reduce the risk of C# or VB.NET development in the Microsoft framework with deep static analysis, security, and coverage for enterprise and embedded applications.
Reduce the risk of C# or VB.NET development in the Microsoft framework with deep static analysis, security, and coverage for enterprise and embedded applications.
Request Demo Reduce the risk of C# or VB.NET development in the Microsoft framework with deep static analysis, security, and coverage for enterprise and embedded applications.
dotTEST helps users improve code quality, identify security vulnerabilities by applying CWE, OWASP and other standards.
dotTEST integrates tightly into your CI/CD pipeline for real-time, static analysis findings of C# and VB.NET codebases.
Teams can view test results on the desktop, web, or in static HTML reports, regardless of where they were executed.
Perform static analysis, unit testing, and code coverage to develop high-quality C and C++ code that is robust, safe, secure, and compliant with industry standards.
Achieve static code analysis, unit testing, and high code coverage with JUnit to accelerate the delivery of secure and reliable Java applications.
One of the best things you can do to be successful is to understand the four main types of static code analysis and the errors these tests are designed to detect.
Performance tests identify errors that will address overall performance issues and help developers keep up with the latest best practices.
Security-related source code analysis finds security risks like weak cryptography, configuration problems, and framework-specific command injection errors.
Safety and reliability tests help prevent issues with functionality because no one wants off-hour emergency unresponsive service messages. This type of static code analysis is especially useful for finding memory leaks or threading problems.
Style tests encourage teams to adopt uniform coding styles for ease of use, understanding, and bug fixing. Developers don’t have to waste time identifying style violations. The tests find them, which saves time.
There are concrete best practices and emerging best practices that developers should adopt when it comes to static analysis for code safety, security, and reliability. Keep the following in mind to produce fewer errors.
Identify the scope of the problem.
Ensure that the code is readable for other developers.
Write code with reusability in mind.
Keep extensibility available if an application needs new features in the future.
Develop code that uses minimal resources while still executing quickly.
Utilize dynamic and static analysis.
Static analysis tools can be effective when a project is incomplete and partially coded. That means these tools can be introduced and used at any phase of a software development project, which is a major benefit in software engineering. It’s important to consider the maturity of the product under development because it can impact the way static analysis can be adopted.
The biggest challenge with introducing static analysis is that a compilation of a large amount of code can produce a large number of warnings.
That’s why your focus should be on getting your team as productive as possible when integrating static analysis into a project. This will prevent your team from being overwhelmed by the many static analysis warnings they will most likely have. Most developers don’t have the luxury of immediately fixing existing or legacy code.
As your team becomes more proficient, you will be able to incorporate secondary goals such as improving overall quality and enforcing the organization’s coding standards. Developers can analyze results quickly, deal with false positives, and fix bugs efficiently as static analysis becomes a daily routine. They will also be able to deal with false positives.
The primary approach to adopting static analysis for these projects is called acknowledge-and-defer. Because there isn’t a lot of new code being developed, all of the discovered bugs and security vulnerabilities are added to the existing technical debt.
The recommended approach to integration is called a line-in-the-sand approach. This approach means improving new code as it’s developed while deferring less critical warnings as technical debt.
Developers can integrate static analysis in their development environments from the very start and in a control flow manner to ensure code is written at a high-quality standard. The approach to adoption, in this case, is aptly named greenfield.
Why Parasoft’s Static Code Analysis Solution?
Parasoft offers C/C++test, Jtest, and dotTEST to accelerate the delivery of safe, secure, compliant, and high-quality software through its static code analysis of C, C++, Java, C#, and VB.NET.
Our static analysis detects complex runtime errors early in the development stage without the need to execute costly runtime tests. Parasoft analyzes the execution paths through the code to find possible issues and even dead code. It also detects security vulnerabilities such as a tainted data file, buffer overflows, command injection, or SQL injection. Implement Parasoft’s static analysis solution to:
Frequently Asked Questions
Static analysis is the process of examining source code without execution, usually for the purposes of finding bugs or evaluating code safety, security and reliability. Static analysis can be used on partially complete code, libraries, and third-party source code.
Static code analysis tools assess, compile, and check for vulnerabilities and security flaws to analyze code under test. A state-of-the-art tool can apply a checker to find issues, violations, and vulnerabilities in the code.
Because static analysis does not require execution, developers can apply it at the implementation phase of the SDLC. This provides immediate remediation where bugs are at the easiest and least expensive phase to fix. This approach is commonly referred to as shift-left.
Dynamic analysis is the testing of code for quality, security, and safety through various methods like unit testing, integration testing, system testing, and others, that require code execution. Static analysis is the process of examining source code without execution.
DevOps is a methodology used in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) that improves work between development and operations. Because it encompasses the SDLC, you have each development phase in a loop. Within several of these phases, static analysis can be deployed to identify defects, vulnerabilities, and compliance issues, ensuring that your code is safe and secure.
A false positive occurs when a static analysis tool incorrectly reports that a static analysis rule was violated. It can be subjective so it depends on the developer’s interpretation.
Static analysis and compilers both provide warnings used to improve code quality and serve as a first method of identifying issues before execution and debugging. A compiler utilizes static analysis during compilation to generate warnings, but the quality and scope of diagnostics are limited and can vary.
