Today’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the software industry are faced with major challenges. While having to work efficiently using limited resources they have to perform quality assurance on their code to avoid the risk of further effort for bug fixes or compensations. Automated static analysis can reduce this risk because it promises little effort for running an analysis. We report on our experience in analysing five projects from and with SMEs by three different static analysis techniques: code clone detection, bug pattern detection and architecture conformance analysis. We found that the effort that was needed to introduce those techniques was small (mostly below one person-hour), that we can detect diverse defects in production code and that the participating companies perceived the usefulness of the presented techniques as well as our analysis results high enough to include the techniques in their quality assurance.
Hofer @cite_12 states that only 10 Returning to automated static analysis techniques, to the best of our knowledge, multiple techniques have never been applied in a study in an SME context. However, there are several publications in which such techniques were investigated separately and in other contexts:
@cite_12
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In this paper we present the results of an empirical study conducted within small and very small software developing enterprises in Austria. The primary goals of this survey were to find out how they are structured, to learn more about their characteristics, and how they organize software development. Furthermore we evaluate methods, processes, techniques and tools used, persons and roles involved, and finally problems occurring during software development. Additionally we place a special focus on quality management issues and discuss which motivations small and very small enterprises can have to install such a quality management system.