FindBugs papers

The  FindBugs web page (  http://findbugs.sourceforge.net/#papers  ) links to two papers, both presented at PASTE 2007.  They are

• Finding More Null Pointer Bugs, But Not Too Many, by David Hovemeyer, York College of Pennsylvania and William Pugh, Univ. of Maryland, 7th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT Workshop on Program Analysis for Software Tools and Engineering, June, 2007
• Evaluating Static Analysis Defect Warnings On Production Software, Nathaniel Ayewah and William Pugh, Univ. of Maryland, and J. David Morgenthaler, John Penix and YuQian Zhou, Google, Inc., 7th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGSOFT Workshop on Program Analysis for Software Tools and Engineering, June, 2007 

An earlier paper, from OOPSLA 2004, gives a more thorough description of the basic ideas in FindBugs.  It is

• Hovemeyer, D. and Pugh, W. 2004. Finding bugs is easy. In Companion To the 19th Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications (Vancouver, BC, CANADA, October 24 - 28, 2004). OOPSLA '04. ACM, New York, NY, 132-136. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1028664.1028717

Although the OOPSLA paper is older, I think we need the general overview, so I'd like to suggest we read that one.  But actually I'd like to read that plus the null pointer detection paper, to see how the (fairly simple) pattern detection in the original version of FindBugs is extended and refined to be more effective.