October meeting follow-up

Idera buys Embarcadero:

In October, Idera announced that they were purchasing Embarcadero, which raises some questions about the future of Delphi. By all accounts, they intend to continue investing in my favourite development tools, and even strengthen that investment.

I look forward to hearing more.

Static code analysis:

Almost since there have been high level programming languages for developing software, we have had tools to check that software for correctness.

I believe code analysis tools are one of the cheapest and easiest ways to improve the quality of your code and avoid long term problems in your software before they even occur.

John Kaster once said that you should run these against your code before someone else does. I find them very useful in regular development and essential for evaluating projects that I am taking over.

Here are some of the ones we discussed:

• The compiler’s own hints and warnings. This is your first line of defence. Ignore these at your own risk.
• QA Audits and Metrics are also available out of the box. They could be easier to read, but they are comprehensive and worth taking a look.
• CodeHealer from the CodeHealer Group takes a more minimalistic approach. This is one of my favourite tools because of how well it sniffs out legitimate and difficult to find problems. They currently have a steep discount available from CodeRage.
• Pascal Analyzer from Peganza is the opposite of minimalistic, with comprehensive and detailed reports on all aspects of a software project. One really useful report lets you clean up uses clauses which helps reduce dependencies and improve build times. They have a free stand alone tool that does the same thing called ICARUS.
• FixInsight from SourceOddity. This is a new tool that I have not had much experience with, but it looks very promising. The author has generously created a discount code just for us.  Use the code TDUG20 to get a 20% discount.

Future Meetings:

Our next meeting will be on Thursday, November 19th at the North York Central Library where we will continue the current series of presentations about software development best practices. We will send a reminder before the meeting with more details.

We will be taking a break in December for the holidays and start up again in January of 2016.

Please let us know your thoughts and what you would like to talk about.

Update:

I stand corrected. Apparently the audits and metrics built in to the IDE can be automated, at least in the Enterprise SKU. It was introduced in DElphi XE.