As the topic suggests, this kind of argument has been around for some time. Most developers can recognize the need for tools but once you start breaking the developer’s day-to -day workflow you might as well flush that tool down the drain.
What developers need is a tool that seamlessly integrates with their development environment and their workflow, so they can meet their quality goals without taking a big productivity hit.
It’s one thing to provide plug-in tools for the more popular IDEs like Visual Studio and Eclipse, but it’s an added bonus when defect detection is a seamless part of the edit cycle. No buttons to click, just continuous analysis and issue highlighting while you work.
Let’s take the analogy to the spell checker. Initially, you had to click a button to spell check your document. That has obviously changed dramatically. Now we see any mistakes we make as we type them (and can even fix them automatically).
That’s what we were thinking when we introduced continuous analysis in our plug-in tools and our source viewer for command-line tools, Klocwork Desktop.
Here’s the spell checker equivalent for source code analysis:
The above screenshot is from our Visual Studio plug-in.
When you open or save a file, the analysis runs in the background. A bug marker in the left gutter and a squiggly line, in the true spirit of the spell checker, clearly marks the detected issue.
Find ‘em and fix’em while you work.
