AmirWatad.com

Tools to Improve the Quality of Your Code

Just found a nice link at Wikipedia with a collection of tools to help analyzing the quality of your code.

One interesting one is PMD (for Java), which is opensource. It statically analyses your code and alerts for potential problems.

For C, there is splint (opensource as well), which statically analyses your code for potential coding mistakes and security vulnerabilities.

The full list at Wikipedia is here.

Another great tool, which is not directly related to the above, is Valgrind. While the above statically analyze your code (i.e., they find potential problems by “just looking at the code”), Valgrind is a tool for dynamic analysis, which means, it analyses the code by monitoring the way it runs. It can report possible memory leaks, possible deadlooks, and many other information. (The full tool suite description can be found here). The output of Valgrind is not very easy to read, but with a little practice one can feel more comfortable with it.

There is also a list of tools for dynamic analysis at Wikipedia. It’s located here and may be worths a glance.

Enjoy coding

Tags: Code Quality, Programming