Topics In Demand
Notification
New

No notification found.

Functional Code Vs Structural Code Analyzers
Functional Code Vs Structural Code Analyzers

September 16, 2022

181

0

Functional Code Vs Structural Code Analyzers

 

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.

 

 

 

 


That the contents of third-party articles/blogs published here on the website, and the interpretation of all information in the article/blogs such as data, maps, numbers, opinions etc. displayed in the article/blogs and views or the opinions expressed within the content are solely of the author's; and do not reflect the opinions and beliefs of NASSCOM or its affiliates in any manner. NASSCOM does not take any liability w.r.t. content in any manner and will not be liable in any manner whatsoever for any kind of liability arising out of any act, error or omission. The contents of third-party article/blogs published, are provided solely as convenience; and the presence of these articles/blogs should not, under any circumstances, be considered as an endorsement of the contents by NASSCOM in any manner; and if you chose to access these articles/blogs , you do so at your own risk.


images
Sameer Paradkar
Enterprise Architect - Modernization Domain

Software Architect, Author & Speaker

© Copyright nasscom. All Rights Reserved.