Here are my best tools for static code analysis which you can use with your programming projects. Quite often I see programmers who struggle with checking their code for bugs/issues. We all make mistakes (don’t worry!), but it’s how we learn. I wrote this article to help programmers find the most efficient tools for static code analysis, so that they can save time, and avoid these 5 common mistakes.
With everything that is going on in the software world, it seems that code quality might be falling by the wayside sometimes. Static analysis tools are powerful tools for keeping our code clean and free of bugs. Many developers consider tools like SonarQube to be standard coding practice. Let’s take a look at some of the best static analysis tools out there today.
SonarQube
SonarQube is one of the more popular static code analysis tools out there. It is an open-source platform for continuous inspection of code quality and performs automatic reviews via static code analysis. In addition, it can detect and report bugs, code smells, and numerous other security vulnerabilities.
There are more features:
- SonarQube integrates with multiple platforms, including GitHub, Azure DevOps, Bitbucket, GitLab, Docker Support, and coding IDEs like Eclipse, Visual Studio, etc. Visual Studio Code, and IntelliJ IDEA.
- It also supports an impressive 25+ programming languages, including C#, Python, Cobol, PHP, and Java – to name a few.
- This tool helps developers observe a three-pronged attack on their code by avoiding bugs or undefined behavior, breaches or attacks, and easing code updates, increasing development speed.
- Developers can easily tackle their errors and oversights because the mistakes are classified by severity, mapped to secure coding standards (E.g., CERT, MISRA, and CWE), fully documented, and – overall – lead to the implementation of best practices and improvement of coding.
- It also reports duplicate code, lax coding standards, unit tests, code coverage, code complexity, and comments.
- Although most users, and even organizations, will be happy with the free community version of SonarQube, they can also choose from a few more paid versions of the software that come with enhanced features and capabilities.
Synopsis Coverity
With Synopsis Coverity Static Analysis, developers can look forward to quickly finding and fixing bugs in their code. Coverity identifies critical software quality defects and security vulnerabilities in code and any lapses in industry compliance standards.
It is an easy-to-use, accurate, and scalable tool that irons out bugs in the early stages of an SDLC.
Looking into more features:
- Thanks to the Code Sight IDE plugin, Coverity allows developers to find and fix security or quality issues in real-time as they write their code.
- Developers are also privileged to real-time, accurate, and incremental analyses that run seamlessly in the background; they are also shown how to fix the problems and secure their code – from right inside their IDEs.
- The tool hits the ground running as it can immediately start spotting and fixing bugs right out of the box – with no tuning required.
- It integrates well into DevOps pipelines via REST APIs and offers Continuous Integration (CI) and Software Configuration Management (SCM).
- Also, the tool offers a centralized aggregated risk profile of entire application portfolios, while APIs allow for exporting the results to other risk reporting tools.
- Developers can filter identified vulnerabilities by category, prioritize vulnerabilities based on their criticality, and manage security policy compliance across teams and projects.
- They can also access trend reports, or even reports that show severity levels at various times, to analyze information about the security status of projects; these reports can be exported to serve as proof of compliance come audit time.
Raxis
Raxis does one better than automated tools that often discover false findings that waste time and effort.
Raxis scopes an amount of time that works best for your company’s code and assigns a security-focused former developer to analyze your code for both general security and business-logic vulnerabilities.
Raxis communicates throughout to be sure your input is used within the code review, and they provide a report that details each finding with screenshots and remediation advice. A high-level summary that can be provided to management and a debriefing call are also included.
PVS-Studio
PVS-Studio is a tool for detecting bugs and security weaknesses in the source code of programs, written in C, C++, C#, and Java. It works in Windows, Linux, and macOS environment.
It is possible to integrate it into Visual Studio, IntelliJ IDEA, and other widespread IDE. The results of the analysis can be imported into SonarQube.
Enter the #top40 promo code in the message field on the download page to get the PVS-Studio license for a month instead of 7 days.
Embold
Embold is an intelligent software analytics platform that supports developers and teams in building higher quality software in less time, by speeding up code reviews.
It automatically prioritizes hotspots in the code and provides clear visualizations. With its multi-vector diagnostic technology, it analyses software from multiple lenses, including software design, and enables users to manage and improve their software quality transparently.
You can run Embold on the cloud, or for IntelliJ IDEA users, download a free plugin directly in your IDE.
CodeScene Behavioral Code Analysis
CodeScene prioritizes technical debt and code quality issues based on how the organization actually works with the code. Hence, CodeScene limits the results to information that is relevant, actionable and translates directly into business value.
CodeScene also goes beyond traditional tools by measuring the organization and people’s side of your system to detect coordination bottlenecks in the software architecture, off-boarding risks, and knowledge gaps.
Finally, CodeScene integrates into your CI/CD pipeline to act as an extra team member that predicts delivery risks and offers context-aware quality gates to supervise the health of your code.
DeepSource
DeepSource helps you to automatically find and fix issues in your code during code reviews. It can be integrated with Bitbucket, GitHub, or GitLab account. This tool looks for anti-patterns, bug risks, performance problems, and raises issues. DeepSource additionally produces and tracks metrics like dependency count, documentation coverage, etc. Analyzers operate at file-level (like anti-pattern found at a particular location), further repository-level problems (like four dependencies found that don’t seem to be installed). DeepSource Autofix suggests fixes for issues detected and create a pull request with the recommended changes.
Key Features
- Single file configuration
- Quality checks on Pull Request
- Broad-spectrum of issue coverage
- Actively maintained analyzers
- Know about each issue in detail
- Track code metrics
- Customize your analysis to ignore issues that are intentional
- Analyzers can suggest fixes for the commonly occurring issue and if you allow them then they can create pull requests with the fixes
- Run code formatters like Black, YAPF, Go fmt, and many others, on each commit and pull request. No CI setup is needed.
Drawbacks
- Support for PHP language is not available
Language support
Python, JavaScript, Go, Ruby, Java, Docker, TestIdentify and fix bug risks, anti-patterns, performance issues, and security flaws on every commit and pull request coverage, SQL, Terraform, Shell.
Pricing:
Free to use for open-source, Students, and Non-Profit Organisations. Paid plans starts from 12 USD user/month.
Conclusion
I’m not trying to make this an ad or anything, but software development companies should be using tools for static code analysis. Static code analysis keeps the code clean, makes it faster and more secure, and can help save time and money by automating certain things. But it’s easy to overlook this for small projects, especially when there are other things that seem more important at the time.