Applying Code Conventions: the role of automation
Open University, Milton Keynes, (2007)Abstract
Code conventions and style guidelines are an often ignored tool in a developer's tool-kit for ensuring that the code that they write is easily communicated to other developers. Arguments abound for reasons why code conventions are ignored ? lack of time, more important things to do,
personal opinions over which style to employ... Despite these arguments, it is commonly perceived opinion amongst the development community that clear style and coding guidelines lead to code that is more readable and more maintainable.
A number of software tools are available that analyse source code, and compare the code against specified style and coding conventions. Clearly, it is possible for an autonomous agent to identify the convention violations, but still the developer must manually correct the identified problems.
Ideally the software tool should be able to fix those violations, not just identify them, but a small amount of thought on the subject quickly ascertains that an automated tool would not necessarily have enough knowledge and understanding of the code and it's problem domain to be able to correct
all types of violation. This research investigates the types of convention violations that are able to be fixed autonomously, and identifies a number of category types which would appear to be candidates for automatic correction, in order to allow developers to focus on the violations that do require human input.