SBIR Phase I: Efficient static analysis tools for detecting bugs in large software

This Small Business Innovation Research project investigates and explores the feasibility of commercializing bug detection tools to improve the quality and productivity of a variety of software developed by various industry segments. The tools are based on state-of-art data-mining tools under development at the University of Illinois. The proposed project will improve the accuracy, usability and robustness of the tools in order to make them more user-friendly and reliable. The tools, once commercialized, can benefit a large market of IT departments in different business segments (IT, finance, government, entertainment, insurance, etc) to improve their software quality and productivity and reduce the software development cost via automatic bug detection. In contrast to traditional manual efforts that usually takes a programmer 1-2 weeks to detect a bug, the proposed tools can easily identify hundreds of bugs in millions lines of code automatically in 1-2 hours. In addition to detecting software bugs, the proposed tools could also be used to detect copyright infringment and plagiarism from open source or other software.