Designing UIs for Static Analysis Tools

Abstract

Static-analysis tools suffer from usability issues such as a high rate of false positives, lack of responsiveness, and unclear warning descriptions and classifications. Here, we explore the effect of applying user-centered approach and design guidelines to SWAN, a security-focused static-analysis tool for the Swift programming language. SWAN is an interesting case study for exploring static-analysis tool usability because of its large target audience, its potential to integrate easily into developers' workflows, and its independence from existing analysis platforms.