SourceAudit - Business Aspects

Developing software is difficult! Writing high quality and maintainable source code is even more difficult! SourceAudit is the right tool for controlling source code quality from the earliest stage of work. Using this tool during the development ensures finding bugs and errors in the earliest possible phase, therefore saving time and money.

Have you ever had problems with software quality?

• Is the code too complex? Is it difficult to understand and maintain?
• Is the development of new features painful?
• Is the code full of bugs and bad practices constructs?
• Are too many testing iterations needed? Is testing too expensive?
• Do post-release defects make your reputation fall apart?

For these, and many similar problems, the right solution is SourceAudit, based on the Columbus technology.

SourceAudit is a software tool designed especially for developers to help them understand, improve, and maintain their code by using sophisticated static analysis methods and technologies.

SourceAudit offers a wide selection of features and aids in-depth analysis of your code by calculating:

• source code metrics
  Software measurement is an essential element of management; there is little chance of controlling what we cannot measure. Software metrics are measures of some property of a piece of software, its source code or its specification. There are several aspects of measuring software attributes…
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Checking for:

• code duplications
  It is a common practice to reuse source code by simply copying and pasting its parts. Although this approach can reduce software development time, the price in the long-term must be paid in the form of increased maintainability costs. One of the primary concerns is that if the original code segment needs to be corrected, all the copied parts need to be checked and changed accordingly as well.
  Read more >> || Description of code duplications (PDF)
• so called "bad code smells"
  In computer programming, bad code smell is a symptom in the source code that possibly indicates a deeper problem, which can lead to a malfunctioning software.
  Read more >> || Description of bad smells (PDF)
• bugs, coding problems, bad practices and coding style
  Best practices provide guidelines for writing good, fast, maintainable, secure code. FrontEndART's products are capable of checking whether these best practices are being adhered to or not by developers. Besides these best practices, the tools can detect serious programming errors, which are either caused by unawareness or inadvertence of the developers. Read more >>

Source code metrics help identifying the most critical parts of the code:

• The most complex parts
• Entities with the highest coupling factor
• Cohesion-related issues, etc

Besides, these metrics help to evaluate the overall quality by estimating maintenance efforts and costs.

Bad smells are inefficient or error prone code constructs that are potentially risky. They serve as an ideal starting point for code refactoring.

Code duplications (copy&paste source code fragments) are the main enemies of software maintenance, since all fixes and modifications have to be repeated for every duplicate. Consequently they lead to:

• Inconsistently changing code parts
• Hardly maintainable code

SourceAudit finds all the duplicates (clones), and helps evaluating and eliminating them.

SourceAudit discovers coding issues, bad practices and style inconsistencies during the development phase, by performing a so called “static testing” (static analysis), which is much cheaper than conventional testing. By discovering coding problems in the early phase of development, unnecessary iterations of testing can be avoided.

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