Importance of Static code analysis

From last few years, software code quality has become a necessity. Many organizations are making it mandatory for the software to pass the software quality and security test before it’s deployment as a product.

In the software product development process, source code analysis tools have a great impact. With the increasing customer demand in terms features and functionalities, there is also a need to ensure the faster release of the products with highest standards in terms of quality.

Every organization aims at providing ample flexibility to accommodate changes in their product development cycle. They need to release their products faster with the continuous testing of inherent functions.

Static code analysis tool is an analytical tool which analyses the computer code errors before executing them to find the potential vulnerabilities, bugs and security threats. It is source code audit tool which checks the source code with a predefined set of rules which is a fast and efficient way of finding code defects and inconsistencies, especially in large codes.

A static code analysis tool can improve the code quality in the following ways-

• Detecting the areas where the code needs deeper testing and reviews.
• Simplifying the code by detecting the areas that need to refactor.
• Assuring the potential and quality of the software by analyzing the code before it moves for production.
• Reducing the code complexity and improving the maintainability by identifying design issues.

Static code analysis tools help you to find bugs at an early stage of your software development cycle. This means developers have to incur less cost to fix them. With the help of static code, you can define your project specific rules which will be ensured to follow without any manual interventions. If anyone fails to follow these set of rules then it will get highlighted by static code analyzer.

Though static code analyzer is a useful tool, it also comes with some disadvantages. One of the biggest problems of these tools is that they produce false positives. Another problem with the static code analyzers is that they take too long to run and so many programmers did not bother to run them again.

The purpose of using static code analysis tool is to augment the testing instead of replacing it. It becomes mandatory for the projects with ultimate security requirements to employ static code analysis tool, as it is very good to find potential vulnerabilities at an early stage.