Engineers Believe In Coding Standards But Fail To Effectively Enforce Them

74% of respondents stated that they made use of coding standards, but only 35% of made use of static analysis tools that would ensure software engineers adhered to the standards. Manual code inspection and relying on trust has been shown to be a very ineffective way of enforcing coding standards, particularly in more complex sections of the code that will be more prone to bugs. Therefore almost half the companies that believe in the benefits of standards are failing to ensure compliance, which means that their code is likely to contain more bugs, be less maintainable and ultimately result in higher costs to the company.

“Whilst it is good news that the message about the benefits of coding standards has been taken on board by the majority of embedded development teams in Europe, it’s a real concern that only a third of companies use tools to ensure standards are observed,” said Paul Blundell, CEO of PRQA. “Using static analysis tools not only ensures compliance, but also ensures a consistent interpretation of the standard. We’re faced with a situation where two thirds of development teams could be cutting corners, misinterpreting or ignoring coding standards, despite three-quarters of engineers believing that standards result in higher-quality code.”

PRQA pioneered the use of static analysis technology to automatically enforce coding standards and are dominant player in the growing CSE (coding standard enforcement) space. QA•C and QA•C++ analysis tools can be directly targeted towards coding standard enforcement. Configuration of the message system and associated message text, help and classification can all be achieved to enforce the coding standard you need to comply with.