JDQuery: Query-Driven Defect Localization for Java Source Code Based on Code Knowledge Graphs

Abstract

Java is one of the most widely used object-oriented programming languages, making accurate and efficient defect localization essential for improving software quality and reliability. Conventional static analysis techniques primarily rely on predefined rules and localized syntactic matching, which may limit their ability to capture complex structural and semantic relationships among program entities. To address these limitations, this paper proposes JDQuery, a query-driven defect localization framework for Java source code based on a code knowledge graph. The framework parses Java source code into abstract syntax trees (ASTs), extracts software entities and their semantic relationships according to a formalized domain ontology, and constructs a unified code knowledge graph that integrates syntactic and semantic information. Based on the structural characteristics of Java defects, defect patterns are translated into Cypher queries, enabling flexible defect localization through graph pattern matching. Experiments on multiple open-source Java projects, including both injected defects and native real-world defects, demonstrate that JDQuery achieves precision values of 97.20% and 92.87% on two projects of different code sizes. A comparative evaluation with PMD further shows that JDQuery achieves substantially higher recall while maintaining comparable precision for the evaluated defects. Efficiency experiments demonstrate that JDQuery maintains millisecond-level query latency even when processing large-scale Java projects.