Intel® Inspector User Guide for Linux* OS

ID 767796
Date 7/13/2023
Public

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Document Table of Contents

States

To avoid investigating issues over and over again, save your investigative conclusions by assigning states to the issues you investigate.

State information is persistent within the Intel Inspector result, including when you reopen the result.

Intel Inspector also propagates state information from an older result to a newer result when you take advantage of various baseline result options.

Available States

Intel Inspector offers the following states:

Filter Criterion

Set By

State

Meaning

Not investigated

Intel Inspector

Regression

The issue requires more investigation because it was marked as Fixed in the baseline result, but still appears.

New

The issue did not appear in the baseline result, or there is no older result from which the Intel Inspector can propagate state information.

Intel Inspector or User

Not Fixed

The issue appeared in the baseline result and still requires investigation.

Investigated

User

Confirmed

The issue requires fixing but has not yet been fixed.

TIP:

Report Confirmed issues in a bug tracking system.

Fixed

The issue requires fixing and has been fixed.

Not a problem

The issue does not require fixing.

Deferred

You are postponing further investigation on an issue that may or may not require fixing.

Typical Usage Model

  1. Use the default Get problem states from previous result of same analysis type baseline result option.

  2. Run an analysis.

  3. Use the filtering function to temporarily limit the displayed issues to only those that are Not investigated.

  4. Set the state of each problem issue you investigate as:

    • Confirmed - Issue requires fixing but has not yet been fixed.

    • Fixed - Issue requires fixing and has been fixed.

    • Not a Problem - Issue does not require fixing.

    • Deferred - Delay further investigation.

  5. The next time you rerun the analysis, verify the issues you expect to be fixed are indeed fixed.

State Propagation

Intel Inspector propagates state information from the baseline result when it determines an issue in a new result corresponds to an issue in the baseline result. For example, if you set the state for a problem in the baseline result to Not a Problem, the Intel Inspector sets the state for the corresponding problem in the new result to Not a Problem.

The only exception: If you set an issue state to Fixed in the baseline result but the issue still appears in the new result, the Intel Inspector sets the issue state to Regression in the new result.

CAUTION:

Intel Inspector may not recognize an issue as previously investigated when it propagates state information from a baseline result. This is more likely to happen when source code has undergone drastic changes between analysis runs.

States and Filters

Use the Intel Inspector filtering to focus on issues in specific states. For example, in the Filters pane on the Summary window:

  • In the Investigated category, choose Not investigated to reduce clutter by displaying only issues with a state of New, Not fixed, or Regression.

  • In the State category, choose Confirmed to review issues that are - or should be - reported in your bug tracking system.

  • In the State category, choose New to concentrate on issues introduced since the last analysis run.

  • In the State category, choose Regression to verify all issues marked as Fixed in the baseline were successfully fixed.

  • In the State category, choose Not a problem to double-check earlier conclusions that no fix is needed.

States Hierarchy

When you change the state of a problem set, the Intel Inspector responds by similarly changing the state of all problems currently in the problem set.

In scenarios where a problem set contains problems with different states (such as when source code changes introduce a new instance of a problem previously set to a non-new state), the Intel Inspector assigns the most severe state to the problem set according to this hierarchy:

  1. Regression (most severe state)

  2. New

  3. Not Fixed

  4. Confirmed

  5. Fixed

  6. Not a Problem

  7. Deferred (least severe state)