An attempt to increase software quality by detecting irregular styles

Abstract

A static program analyzer has been designed and developed. Even though it is natural that large-scale software is developed by a number of groups under standard guidelines, it is often convenient that each group have group-oriented guidelines in addition to the standard guidelines. This is because the standard guidelines do not reflect factors unique to each group. The tool regards coding styles as a set of static properties of a program. With this tool, the user can define such static properties to be detected, called irregular styles. The paper describes the definition of an irregular style, a detection strategy, and evaluation of its results.<>