Testing Heuristics and Static Analysis at ICSE 09

I had a very critical talk with two grad students from Queen's yesterday, whom I unfortunately can only identify as Jackie and Brahm. They had a difficult time accepting the immediate usefulness/significance of the study I was proposing, and that's fine, as they came up with a few useful suggestions that I can leverage, primarily to keep a narrow focus and always be aware of the result I'm trying to generate. Two interesting opinions they shared with me are below:

Are the good testers simply those who are most familiar with the SUT (software under test)? This seems entirely plausable (in my own work experience, I was a vastly better tester of sotware that I had written, or at least software written by someone on my team). If so, then the correlation between programming experience and software testing would be much weaker if we are inventing the SUT for our subjects to test. However, I believe to have some empirical evidence to the contrary, in the form of a man called Scott Tindal, who is one of the most skilled QA engineers I've ever had the pleasure of working with. Scott was of the caliber that he could almost single-handedly test every product in the OpenText/Hummingbird line. An interesting configuration of our study may be to experiment with developers testing their own code versus devlopers testing new code that they've never seen before.

Will the heuristics extracted with this study be the same as those already in use by static analysis tools like FindBugs?
It appears that determining a correlation between the techniques that experienced testers use and the heuristics employed by static analysis tools such as FindBugs could be an interesting topic. If there is no correlation between these two, may it be possible to integrate these into SA suites for any significant improvement? If there is a correlation, why haven't more testers adopted static analysis to aid in their efforts? Is it a matter of usability of SA tools? Is it that the formalism used to express the SA heuristics isn't understood by everyday testers, and so they aren't aware of what SA has to offer? I plan to talk to Nathaniel Ayewah, University of Maryland, who is working on the FindBugs team, about this further.