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.
Architecture defines the components of a system and their dependencies. The knowledge about how the architecture is intended to be implemented is essential to keep the system structure coherent and thereby comprehensible. In practice, this architectural knowledge is explicitly formulated only in the documentation (if at all), which usually gets outdated very soon. This leads to a growing amount of implicit knowledge during evolution that is especially volatile in projects with high developer fluctuation.