Customized tools for software quality assurance and reengineering

Describes a new approach to developing tools for measuring and documenting source code compliance with design and coding standards. It also presents preliminary results of applying this approach to software developed for the electrical utility industry. The approach is based on an enabling technology for software evaluation and reengineering. The key technical ideas underlying the technology are to represent source code in the form of abstract syntax trees in an object-oriented database, and to use a library of utilities to analyze software represented in this way. This enabling technology supports rapid implementation and testing of customized design and coding standards. The standards were defined by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). We describe a prototype toolset that we have used for measuring compliance of over 3 million lines of C and Fortran source code as part of evaluating legacy systems that are being reengineered, as well as for performing quality assurance of new applications.