The adoption of a programming discipline is one of the means to control the quality of the code being developed. This is particularly important when the development team is distributed. Modifying or even using code written by others is less difficult if a set of standards are known to be followed. Moreover, programming languages such as C++ give programmers the possibility to obtain a given result in several alternative ways, which span from self descriptive, easy to understand to convoluted and unreasonably complex. Again, enforcing some constraints on the programming constructs that are used, on the naming conventions and on the comments may help. In this paper the tool RuleChecker is described for the automatic verification of coding standards. The tool is built on top of a general C++ analysis package, which was developed in collaboration with CERN. The paper reports some of the design decisions made during the development of the tool. its usage within the Alice experiment at CERN is also described, by first giving some details on the implemented coding conventions and then providing some quantitative measures on the effects of tool adoption within the normal software development process
Automatic Verification of Coding Standards
Potrich, Alessandra;Tonella, Paolo
2001-01-01
Abstract
The adoption of a programming discipline is one of the means to control the quality of the code being developed. This is particularly important when the development team is distributed. Modifying or even using code written by others is less difficult if a set of standards are known to be followed. Moreover, programming languages such as C++ give programmers the possibility to obtain a given result in several alternative ways, which span from self descriptive, easy to understand to convoluted and unreasonably complex. Again, enforcing some constraints on the programming constructs that are used, on the naming conventions and on the comments may help. In this paper the tool RuleChecker is described for the automatic verification of coding standards. The tool is built on top of a general C++ analysis package, which was developed in collaboration with CERN. The paper reports some of the design decisions made during the development of the tool. its usage within the Alice experiment at CERN is also described, by first giving some details on the implemented coding conventions and then providing some quantitative measures on the effects of tool adoption within the normal software development processI documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
