Klocwork takes on strengthening code creation

By Jeff Feinman

November 16, 2009 — Klocwork is spreading out beyond the static analysis game and rolling out new software to help ensure the creation of strong code.

Klocwork Insight Pro, released today, consists of three main pieces of software around continuous static analysis, code review and automated code refactoring. Klocwork Insight Pro’s continuous static analyzer detects defects and vulnerabilities as code is being written. Gwyn Fisher, Klocwork’s CTO, said the new analysis capabilities focus on developers working in “tremendously compressed” development cycles.

“We’ve focused previously on moving further upstream, getting into a developer’s IDE and giving them the capability to run analysis pre-check-in,” Fisher said. “That’s all good stuff, but there’s still that last mile of an IDE’s editor.”

As a result, Klocwork Insight Pro brings what the company calls a no-click usability model that automatically analyzes the editing part of a developer’s IDE. Fisher said changes to development projects, even in opening or saving a file, are automatically analyzed.

Klocwork has also created a collaborative code reviewer that integrates with configuration management environments and Klocwork’s static analyzer. Klockwork Insight Pro conducts code reviews asynchronously over the Web. Developers are notified that code is ready for review through an RSS feed. They can then identify code changes, assign actions and review potential defects, according to Klocwork.

“Code review is the type thing that we all hate doing, but it’s one of those things you have to do in any mature development process,” Fisher said. “The actual purpose of the code review is really difficult to get down to in terms of, ‘Is what you’ve done functionally and performance correct?’ depending on what your definition of 'correct' happens to be. There are so many other things that you tend to get bogged down in when you have these face-to-face reviews.

“So with Klockwork Insight Pro, someone that made a modification six months ago can perform a valuable code review,” he added.

Klocwork Insight Pro also attempts to simplify code refactoring by automating the process. Fisher described this as a refactoring capability within the editing environment that can do a variety of common refactoring actions for things like renaming entities, extracting functions and in-lining expressions.

“It’s all this kind of stuff that just takes the quirkiness out of the code you’ve written and allows you to work towards patterns that your organization as a whole understands,” he said. “This is sort of the first step that we’ll be applying in this direction that helps you create good code that prevents you from spending a day just trying to figure out what the module’s about.”

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