Domain specific warnings: Are they any better?

Tools to detect coding standard violations in source code are commonly used to improve code quality. One of their original goals is to prevent bugs, yet, a high number of false positives is generated by the rules of these tools, i.e., most warnings do not indicate real bugs. There are empirical evidences supporting the intuition that the rules enforced by such tools do not prevent the introduction of bugs in software. This may occur because the rules are too generic and do not focus on domain specific problems of the software under analysis. We underwent an investigation of rules created for a specific domain based on expert opinion to understand if such rules are worthwhile enforcing in the context of defect prevention. In this paper, we performed a systematic study to investigate the relation between generic and domain specific warnings and observed defects. From our experiment on a real case, long term evolution, software, we have found that domain specific rules provide better defect prevention than generic ones.