Level up Your Team with Static Analysis

Developers have access to a variety of tools to help ensure that the code they produce doesn’t break, works as intended, and is easy to understand. Among them are tools that use static analysis.

Static analysis is a technique used to discover issues in your code without actually running it.

Finding issues with your code before it runs is a good thing because it means that you can address issues before they hit production, before they bother users, or before they are costly in any way. Because so much research attention has been paid to static analysis over the years, it’s possible to find all kinds of interesting problems in code without executing it — it really seems like magic!

Let’s start with a small example of the kind of simple things that static analysis can uncover that can save you actual time during development, and prevent real bugs and maintainability issues. Check out this snippet of JavaScript code:

function main(a,b){  return a == null;  }  

An experienced JavaScript developer looking at this code can probably note a couple of things right off the bat:

• The ‘b’ variable is unused in the function
• The function name ‘main’ is not descriptive of its functionality
• You should use ===, not == when comparing to null

While a less seasoned developer might miss #3 or disagree with #2, at least two of these, #1 and #3, can be automatically detected by static analysis. That’s right — instead of a developer having to context switch and review simple things, you can have it done automatically. And as the old saying goes (okay, it’s not an old saying, we just made it up):

When in doubt, automate.

So what kinds of issues can static analysis find? Let’s take a look:

• Quality issues themselves come in a variety of flavors. You can discuss quality in terms of code clarity, bug risk, and complexity, to name a few. Different issues require different means of detection, but many quality issues boil down to analysis that understands the conventions of the programming language under scrutiny. Tools developed within programming language communities tend to enforce the idioms of that community, which can be a very helpful thing in static analysis.
• Security is important to most users of static analysis, and a wide range of issues can be detected. Simple security checks can take the form of making sure that your dependencies are up-to-date or enforcing the deprecation of unsafe functions or APIs. Sophisticated security checks can do what is called data flow analysis, where the paths of data that come from “outside” of the system are extrapolated using complex algorithms.
• Style issues in code are often trivial to detect, but implementing and maintaining consistent style guidelines is a key component of an effective code review process and a maintainable codebase. Simply taking discussions about style off the table can work wonders for a team that tends to quarrel endlessly over the nitpicking style issues that, in the long run, can be automated away.

Between quality, security, and style, static analysis is a serious power-up for your development workflow. So how do you get in on this?

The most useful places to get static analysis results are on your developer’s machines, and again in your team’s pull requests. Fortunately, Code Climate does both.

With our command line tool, you can run a variety of static analysis tools at once to enforce your team’s standards and also look for subtle bugs, complexity issues, duplication, and more. As everyone on your team has access to these tools locally, they can make sure that they aren’t introducing new issues when they push code, improving the quality of commits.

After you push, analysis is run on the Code Climate server and the results pushed directly to your pull request. Reviewers can instantly see that your code doesn’t introduce new errors, letting them focus on reviewing the aspects of the commit which require human expertise.

Once you get some automated static analysis in your workflow, you’ll wonder how you lived without it. The tedious but necessary tasks that burn out your best developers are the ones at which computers excel – and will ensure your code is secure, not prone to a variety of annoying bugs, and conforms to your team’s best practices. We suggest checking it out today!