Tricorder: Building a Program Analysis Ecosystem

Abstract

Abstract—Static analysis tools help developers find bugs, im-prove code readability, and ensure consistent style across a project. However, these tools can be difficult to smoothly in-tegrate with each other and into the developer workflow, partic-ularly when scaling to large codebases. We present TRICORDER, a program analysis platform aimed at building a data-driven ecosystem around program analysis. We present a set of guiding principles for our program analysis tools and a scalable archi-tecture for an analysis platform implementing these principles. We include an empirical, in-situ evaluation of the tool as it is used by developers across Google that shows the usefulness and impact of the platform. Index Terms—program analysis, static analysis I.