Why I need SCA

I am a big fan of Static Code Analysis (SCA) because I learn to produce better code!

I have worked more than 10 years as a professional embedded software developer in several different environments and with different platforms and languages, and I believe I can write decent code.

But you know what, I can’t!!

I have not had a single week during my life that I have delivered perfect code with no errors. The weired part is that I even teach my colleagues how to write better code and write this blog about this subject. So why is it so hard to avoid those tiny, tiny errors. Well because we are humans and not machines. Yeap!! You read right.

If I were a machine it would be possible for me to think on every thing that I need to think on. Psychologist says that the human mind can hold 7 +/- 2 things at the time. If we try to remember more we starting to forget. I believe that you can apply that on writing code. Each software developer focus on different things depending on her/his previous experiences. For me, I usually focus on these things:

• have I initialized parameters?
• can I refactor the code?
• have I covered the new code with unit tests?
• can someone else understand it?
• is this code from a performance perspective (like cache and memory usage)

that was five. Maybe I missed something, but you I am human!

Normally after I have written some code and run my SCA and it founds a error or warning, quite often I say to myself. ahhhh I missed that. Sloppy of me! But sometimes it indicates something new and in my mind goes:

Stop! This one is new! Lets do som digging. 

What I don't do is fix i right away and rerun the SCA.. First I make sure I understand the problem and then I fix it. Through that I always learn something new and maybe I remember seven things to check for instead of 5 next time.