Source code analysis as easy as a spell checker?
ProductFebruary 21, 2012
Alice Moss
Military Embedded Systems
Software developers have enough on their plates without having to spend undue time analyzing their code.
Software developers have enough on their plates without having to spend undue time analyzing their code. Sure, there is traditional source code analysis, whether done manually or by using techniques such as static or dynamic analysis, but Klocwork’s Insight 9.5 is intriguing because it strays away from the centralized batch-processing analysis modus operandi and instead implements on-the-fly, as-it’s-created code analysis: So as developers using C/C++ are writing their code, Insight 9.5 goes to work underlining possible code defects, which the company says looks like a spell checker on word processors. However, Insight 9.5 is doing much more than an ordinary spell checker behind the scenes: It’s performing build comprehension, dataflow and syntax analysis, and incremental analysis continuously, and errors are flagged within milliseconds. Besides the on-the-fly analysis, Insight 9.5, the latest version of Klocwork’s Insight product, also includes on-the-fly reporting, incarnated thanks to a brand-new implementation based on HTML5. On-the-fly reporting comprises a Web reporting tool, new report templates, and a redesigned report creator. The latter two use drop-and-drag pivot chart capabilities. And finally, there’s Insight 9.5’s on-the-fly impact analysis, which looks at possible coding issues across multiple projects and systems, to help save developers from dealing with the same issue again and again as they work with different reused code bases.
