Automatically extracting implicit programming rules and detecting violations from C programs

A general and efficient method is proposed to automatically extract the rules and detect violations to the rules extracted. Closed frequent itemset mining is applied to mine programming patterns. Then these patterns are used to generate programming rules. The concept of Positive Order Rule is introduced to avoid generating redundant rules from the same programming pattern. Based on these efforts, we also propose an efficient violations detection algorithm to detect program segments that are not consistent with the extracted rules. The experiment results on large software source code indicate that this method can automatically extract lots of implicit programming rules and also can efficiently detect the code segments that violate the extracted rules.