Power of Using Regular Expression Patterns in Software Coding Standards Quality Control

Abstract

The regular expression is a method to describe strings that conform to a pattern. The need to use regular expressions arise to deal with strings which have a specific pattern such as a user input string, formatted data, and computer programs code elements. In this paper, the authors intend to establish a framework that aims to improve the quality control process to prove that the source code meets standards using a regular expressions. The framework extracts the code from the files then determines if the written code is following the company's own coding standards. The proposed framework covers the naming convention standards, data types utilizations, undesired programming language commands and keywords, hardcoded literals usage, and as well as the business dictionary tags compliance. The short achieved results shows the effectiveness of regular expressions to figure out the compliance of the source code with the standards rules set.