Employing different program analysis methods to study bug evolution

The evolution of software bugs has been a well-studied topic in software engineering. We used three different program analysis tools to examine the different versions of two popular sets of programming tools (gnu Binary and Core utilities), and check if their bugs increase or decrease over time. Each tool is based on a different approach, namely: static analysis, symbolic execution, and fuzzing. In this way we can observe potential differences on the kinds of bugs that each tool detects and examine their effectiveness. To do so, we have performed a qualitative analysis on the results. Overall, our results indicate that we cannot say if bugs either decrease or increase over time and that the tools identify different bug types based on the method they follow.