Static Analysis at GitHub: An experience report

The Semantic Code team at GitHub builds and operates a suite of technologies that power symbolic code navigation on github.com. We learned that scale is about adoption, user behavior, incremental improvement, and utility. Static analysis in particular is difficult to scale with respect to human behavior; we often think of complex analysis tools working to find potentially problematic patterns in code and then trying to convince the humans to fix them. Our approach took a different tack: use basic analysis techniques to quickly put information that augments our ability to understand programs in front of everyone reading code on GitHub with zero configuration required and almost immediate availability after code changes.