Monday, March 28, 2016

Scitools Understand

Scitools Understand


Source Code Analyzers as a Development Tool
May 24, 2013 | Richard Brett

It is difficult to write consistent and high quality code when using libraries/sdks from multiple sources and when development is distributed between several teams and multiple time zones.  Many challenges exist for both new and experienced developers including lack of documentation, insufficient unit test coverage and nuances to each platform/sdk that make things different. It becomes necessary for developers of one platform to understand complicated legacy code of an unfamiliar platform. To make things more complex, it may be written in a language they do not understand well.  It is estimated that upto 60-80% of programmer’s time is spent to maintain a system and 50% of that maintenance effort is spent understanding that program (http://www.bauhaus-stuttgart.de/bauhaus/index-english.html).

It is helpful for developers to have  tools that can analyze different codebases quickly. A rather comprehensive list of source code analyzer tools for each platform is listed here: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tools_for_static_code_analysis) .  Since an in-depth comparison of the multitude of analyzer tools is beyond the scope of this article, all figures and analysis were done by using Understand by Scitools, a typical albeit premium source code analysis tool.

Understand by SciTools

Understand by SciTools has the ability to scan Ada, Cobol, C/C++, C#, Fortran, Objective-C, Java, Jovial, Pascal, PL/M, Python and others. Like many multi-language analyzer programs it is not free, however, the benefits of such a program are enormous. (For the purposes of this demonstration, a deprecated and unused codebase was analyzed.)....

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