Introduction
Modern day enterprises are critically dependent on business applications. These applications are a collection of data and business logic encapsulated in programming constructs and plethora of platform components, such as operating systems, databases, hardware and network infrastructure. These components are mutable and each one of them would be slowly but inevitably diverging from its ideal state toward a suboptimal level, which potentially lead towards an obsolescence or failure. Through judicious investment IT teams and executives can fight off the ravages of time and reverse the aging process to reduce the technical debt.
The complexity of today’s business applications has exceeded the capacity of individuals or teams to articulate the end-2-end picture. Software programmers may be experts in one or two technologies and languages, but none will have expertise and knowledge in all the languages and technologies leveraged to build modern day applications. This is where the automated analysers play a vital role as part of the engagement SDLC. There are 2 types of analysers that can be leveraged for application quality analysis and assessment which are explained in the following sections
Functional Code Analyzers
Static code analyser’s assesses quality interms degree of compliance with the coding practices of software engineering that promote security, extensibility, reliability, and maintainability. Static analysers find weaknesses in program code that might lead to vulnerabilities. Static code analysers analyses source code for specific defects as well as for compliance with various coding standards and coding guidelines. The tools Identifies security vulnerabilities and hotspots during development and catches these critical issues. Fixing these flaws during implementation phase can reduce the number of builds necessary to produce an optimum and secured product and educate development team about coding practices and guidelines. Static code analysers review the source code to detect common bad practices, catch bugs, and make sure development adheres to standards and guidelines. Most static code analysis tools define a series of rulesets (100+ rules) that identify different categories of issue in the code, for example: programming errors, coding standards violations and security vulnerabilities.
Structural Code Analyzers
The challenges of modern software systems converge ultimately to their architecture. As systems become more complex and huger, their architectures assume ever greater importance in managing their growing coherence, reliability and integrity. When architectural integrity is compromised, the probability for serious operational bottleneck increases dramatically. Interactions among layers and subsystems will become increasingly more complex to articulate. Software Composition Analysers looks inside to identify architecture quality issues. The analyser’s read, analyse and semantically understand all major kinds of source code, across all layers of an application (GUI, logic and data). By analysing all tiers of complex software, critical application health metrics like robustness, maintainability, transferability, flexibility, performance or security can be measured and compliance to best practices can be assessed. The analyser’s look at the application from a static viewpoint but are able to simulate how the application will run, connecting all of the pieces of the puzzle, looking across different languages and database. Hence analysers are able to perform analysis of the entire application or system as to its health.
Disclaimer
The views expressed in this article are the author’s views and AtoS does not subscribe to the substance, veracity or truthfulness of the said opinion.