View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by SZTE Publicatio Repozitórium - SZTE - Repository of Publications Comparison of Static Analysis Tools for Quality Measurement of RPG Programs Zolt´anT´oth1, L´aszl´oVid´acs2, and Rudolf Ferenc1 1 Department of Software Engineering, University of Szeged, Hungary
[email protected],
[email protected] 2 MTA-SZTE Research Group on Artificial Intelligence, Hungary
[email protected] Abstract. The RPG programming language is a popular language em- ployed widely in IBM i mainframes nowadays. Legacy mainframe systems that evolved and survived the past decades usually data intensive and even business critical applications. Recent, state of the art quality assur- ance tools are mostly focused on popular languages like Java, C++ or Python. In this work we compare two source code based quality man- agement tools for the RPG language. The study is focused on the data obtained using static analysis, which is then aggregated to higher level quality attributes. SourceMeter is a command line tool-chain capable to measure various source attributes like metrics and coding rule viola- tions. SonarQube is a quality management platform with RPG language support. To facilitate the objective comparison, we used the SourceMe- ter for RPG plugin for SonarQube, which seamlessly integrates into the framework extending its capabilities. The evaluation is built on analysis success and depth, source code metrics, coding rules and code duplica- tions. We found that SourceMeter is more advanced in analysis depth, product metrics and finding duplications, while their performance of cod- ing rules and analysis success is rather balanced.