A Model-Driven Approach for the Management and Enforcement of Coding Conventions
Coding conventions are a means to improve the reliability of software systems, and they are especially useful to avoid the introduction of known bugs or security flaws. However, coding rules typically come in the form of text written in natural language, which makes them hard to manage and to enforc...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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IEEE
2023-01-01
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| Series: | IEEE Access |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10068210/ |
| _version_ | 1827986628764762112 |
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| author | Elder Rodrigues Jose D'Abruzzo Pereira Leonardo Montecchi |
| author_facet | Elder Rodrigues Jose D'Abruzzo Pereira Leonardo Montecchi |
| author_sort | Elder Rodrigues |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | Coding conventions are a means to improve the reliability of software systems, and they are especially useful to avoid the introduction of known bugs or security flaws. However, coding rules typically come in the form of text written in natural language, which makes them hard to manage and to enforce. Following the model-driven engineering principles, in this paper we propose an approach for the management and enforcement of coding conventions using structured models. We define the Coding Conventions Specification Language (CCSL), a language to define coding rules as structured specifications, from which checkers are derived automatically by code generation. To evaluate our approach, we run a thorough experiment on 8 real open-source projects and 77 coding rules for the Java language, comparing the violations identified by our checkers with those reported by the PMD static analysis tool. The obtained results are promising and confirm the feasibility of the approach. The experiment also revealed that textual coding rules rarely document all the necessary information to write a reliable checker. |
| first_indexed | 2024-04-09T23:34:30Z |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj.art-d44ddcfb5a9b49f3a3046cbc24e4a095 |
| institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
| issn | 2169-3536 |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-04-09T23:34:30Z |
| publishDate | 2023-01-01 |
| publisher | IEEE |
| record_format | Article |
| series | IEEE Access |
| spelling | doaj.art-d44ddcfb5a9b49f3a3046cbc24e4a0952023-03-20T23:00:07ZengIEEEIEEE Access2169-35362023-01-0111257352575410.1109/ACCESS.2023.325688610068210A Model-Driven Approach for the Management and Enforcement of Coding ConventionsElder Rodrigues0Jose D'Abruzzo Pereira1https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0717-3396Leonardo Montecchi2https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7603-9695Institute of Computing, University of Campinas, São Paulo, Campinas, BrazilDepartment of Informatics Engineering, University of Coimbra, Centre for Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra, Coimbra, PortugalInstitute of Computing, University of Campinas, São Paulo, Campinas, BrazilCoding conventions are a means to improve the reliability of software systems, and they are especially useful to avoid the introduction of known bugs or security flaws. However, coding rules typically come in the form of text written in natural language, which makes them hard to manage and to enforce. Following the model-driven engineering principles, in this paper we propose an approach for the management and enforcement of coding conventions using structured models. We define the Coding Conventions Specification Language (CCSL), a language to define coding rules as structured specifications, from which checkers are derived automatically by code generation. To evaluate our approach, we run a thorough experiment on 8 real open-source projects and 77 coding rules for the Java language, comparing the violations identified by our checkers with those reported by the PMD static analysis tool. The obtained results are promising and confirm the feasibility of the approach. The experiment also revealed that textual coding rules rarely document all the necessary information to write a reliable checker.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10068210/Coding standardscoding conventionsmodel-driven engineeringdomain-specific languagesstatic analysis |
| spellingShingle | Elder Rodrigues Jose D'Abruzzo Pereira Leonardo Montecchi A Model-Driven Approach for the Management and Enforcement of Coding Conventions IEEE Access Coding standards coding conventions model-driven engineering domain-specific languages static analysis |
| title | A Model-Driven Approach for the Management and Enforcement of Coding Conventions |
| title_full | A Model-Driven Approach for the Management and Enforcement of Coding Conventions |
| title_fullStr | A Model-Driven Approach for the Management and Enforcement of Coding Conventions |
| title_full_unstemmed | A Model-Driven Approach for the Management and Enforcement of Coding Conventions |
| title_short | A Model-Driven Approach for the Management and Enforcement of Coding Conventions |
| title_sort | model driven approach for the management and enforcement of coding conventions |
| topic | Coding standards coding conventions model-driven engineering domain-specific languages static analysis |
| url | https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10068210/ |
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