JIT feedback: what experienced developers like about static analysis.

Although software developers are usually reluctant to use static analysis to detect issues in their source code, our automatic just-in-time static analysis assistant was integrated into an Integrated Development Environment, and was evaluated positively by its users. We conducted interviews to understand the impact of the tool on experienced developers, and how it performs in comparison with other static analyzers. We learned that the availability of our tool as a default IDE feature and its automatic execution are the main reasons for its adoption. Moreover, the fact that immediate feedback is provided directly in the related development context is essential to keeping developers satisfied, although in certain cases feedback delivered later was deemed more useful. We also discovered that static analyzers can play an educational role, especially in combination with domain-specific rules.