The goal of the proposed work is to create new ways to manage, visualize, and share data produced by multiple software analysis tools, and to create a framework for integrating diversely-sourced analysis tools into software practices, across the lifecycle, in a way that improves both reliability and productivity. Software analysis tools are used by software programmers, analysts, and managers to find potential defects in software source code, to enhance compliance with organizational development standards of practice, and to assist developers and teams in expressing and managing key information regarding design intent. While analysis tools have been shown to offer quality and productivity benefits to programmers, the present user experience limits their effectiveness and is a substantial barrier to their adoption into mainstream software development practices. Additionally, there is a growing number of tools now becoming available, and the tools are proving to have complementary capabilities, which means that groups seeking some comprehensiveness of coverage must develop multi-tool approaches. Finally, a suite of tools can produce more than 10,000 individual findings for a mid-sized software system, creating challenges for prioritization and focus. The project addresses the challenge through the development and evaluation of an analytic tool suite, called Sierra client and server, to support data management, integration, filtering, and querying of large numbers of findings drawn from multiple tools. It does this in a way that supports teams and collaboration, auditing and tracking, longitudinal analysis, interactive visualization, and management analytics.
