Static Analysis - Tools for Improving Engineering Process


Static Analysis Tools
Static program analysis is the analysis of computer software that is performed without actually executing programs built from that software (analysis performed on executing programs is known as dynamic analysis). In most cases the analysis is performed on some version of the source code and in the other cases some form of the object code. The term is usually applied to the analysis performed by an automated tool, with human analysis being called program understanding, program comprehension or code review.

Core activities involved in Static analysis:
  1. N/A

Advantages:
  1. If there are anti-patterns in your code, you can be warned about it.
  2. There are certain metrics (such as McCabe's Cyclomatic Complexity) that tell useful things about source code.
  3. You can also get great stuff like call-graphs, and class diagrams from static analysis. Those are wonderful if you are attacking a new code base
  4. Many classes of memory leaks and common logic errors can be caught statically as well.
  5. It detects bugs (e.g. a warning about an unused argument may indicate you used the wrong argument in the method body).
  6. Understanding the guidelines of static analysis tool is following helps you to become a better developer

Features of Static Analysis tools that need to be considered before picking it:
  1. N/A

Some Popular Open Source Static Analysis Tools:
  1. FxCop (.NET)
  2. CheckStyle (Java)
  3. FindBugs (Java)
  4. PMD (Java)
  5. CPD - Copy / Paste Detector (Java, JSP, C, C++, PHP)

List of other static analysis tools -
  1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tools_for_static_code_analysis

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