Analyzing Application Quality by Using Code Analysis Tools

Article
02/04/2013

Establishing and maintaining code quality is a continuous process throughout the application development lifetime. Code quality is "designed in" during planning and monitored through code reviews and testing. Code Analysis tools in Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Ultimate enable developers to check their code for quality issues as they write it. Team Foundation Server version control check-in policies enable a team to enforce quality standards at every check-in.

Common Tasks

Task	Supporting Content
Understand important code quality processes: You can read the guideline topics to review your development planning and implementation processes and make sure that they enable the achievement of your quality goals.	Guidelines for Writing Secure Code Guidelines for Using Code Analysis Tools Guidelines for Conducting Design and Code Reviews
Use Code Analysis to discover quality issues: Apply code analysis tools to managed code (Visual C# and Visual Basic), native code (Visual C++) and database code (Transact-SQL).	Analyzing Managed Code Quality by Using Code Analysis Analyzing C/C++ Code Quality by Using Code Analysis Analyzing Database Code to Improve Code Quality

Enhancing Code Quality with Team Project Check-in Policies
When you use either Visual Studio Premium or Visual Studio Ultimate, you can create a code analysis check-in policy for the managed code and native code projects in a team project. The code analysis check-in policy can be used to control and improve the quality of code that is checked into the code base.
Measuring Complexity and Maintainability of Managed Code
Many software measures, known as code metrics, have been developed that can help developers understand where their code needs rework or increased testing. Developers can use Visual Studio Premium or Visual Studio Ultimate to generate code metrics data that measure the complexity and maintainability of their managed code.
Verifying Code by Using Unit Tests
Unit tests give developers and testers a quick way to check for logic errors in the methods of classes in Visual C#, Visual Basic, and Visual C++ projects. A unit test can be created one time and run every time that source code is changed to make sure that no bugs are introduced.
Verifying Database Code by Using Unit Tests
You can use database unit tests to establish a baseline state for your database and then to verify any subsequent changes that you make to database objects. By using these tests, you can verify in your isolated development environment whether those objects are behaving correctly before you check them in to version control.