FrontEndART: Ensuring SQA through Intelligent Source Code Analysis

Apart from maintaining software quality across the development cycle, Software Quality Assurance or SQA aims at minimizing the bugs and defects during the “highly intellectual activity.” In today’s software-based environment, there is a huge demand for qualified and cost-efficient software developers to ensure a high level of SQA. This is pushing software houses to offshore development practices into other countries where prices are lower, but ensures enhanced quality control with automated source code analysis and state-of-the-art technology. Szeged, Hungary based FrontEndART provides enterprises with precise, thorough, meaningful, and reliable facts about the quality of their source code in a consumable way. The expertise ranges from very low-level source code metrics through code duplications and coding issues to high-level ones, like maintainability of the source code.

FrontEndART was founded in 2001, with an aim to implement source code analyzer front ends—part of compiler that is responsible for building an abstract model of the source code. “Today, instead of just writing frontends, we have a unique and sophisticated method to objectively quantify the maintainability of software based on the ISO/IEC 25010 standard,” says Tibor Bakota, CEO, FrontEndART. “The approach lies on well-grounded statistical basis and goes far beyond using ‘technical debt’ measure, which is the most common way of expressing the quality of a source code nowadays.”

Most importantly, FrontEndART’s philosophy is to avoid bad code at the gates of an organization and their tool, QualityGate, is developed just to serve this purpose. “The tool offers functionalities for developers and managers to improve the code and a separate module for managing code duplications,” adds Bakota. “QualityGate includes a pre-built, customizable model that describes which aspects of quality are important in the overall qualification.”

Moreover, QualityGate also acts as a source code management tool, which runs a SourceMeter instance—a command line, platform-independent tool that performs the static analysis of source code and builds the abstract representation of it. “It encapsulates all the language frontends we have developed. After analyzing the code, it extracts plenty of information, like source code metrics,” asserts Bakota.