{"id":3253,"date":"2021-06-25T13:59:00","date_gmt":"2021-06-25T11:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.besharp.it\/?p=3253"},"modified":"2021-06-28T11:56:57","modified_gmt":"2021-06-28T09:56:57","slug":"how-to-enrich-your-ci-cd-pipelines-with-static-code-analysis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.besharp.it\/how-to-enrich-your-ci-cd-pipelines-with-static-code-analysis\/","title":{"rendered":"How to enrich your CI\/CD pipelines with static code analysis"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the past, we covered continuous delivery pipelines in multiple blog posts; that’s because having an automatic, reliable, and fully managed way to test and deploy code helps to increase development throughput and the quality of the production code.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An efficient CI\/CD pipeline is necessary to accelerate software delivery without sacrificing quality, and a static code analysis tool should be a step of each continuous delivery pipeline. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A static code analysis tool inspects your codebase through the development cycle, and it’s able to identify bugs, vulnerabilities, and compliance issues without actually running the program. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The code analysis may help to ensure that your software is secure, reliable, and compliant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is static code analysis?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Static code analysis is a practice that allows your team to automatically detect potential bugs, security issues, and, more generally, defects in a software’s codebase. Thus, we can view static analysis as an additional automated code review process. Let’s examine this analogy more in detail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The code review process is probably the better way to improve the quality of the code. During a code review, a pair of programmers read the code with the precise goal to improve it and to spot dangerous practices from both maintainability and security perspectives. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the review process, the code’s author should not explain how certain program parts work so that the reviewer is not biased on its judgment. In addition, the code should be clear to understand and highly maintainable; the complexity of the code should be mitigated by abstraction and incapsulation. Finally, the code should be deemed sufficiently clear, maintainable and safe, by both the programmers to pass the review.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The code review usually works well because it’s easier for the programmer to spot bugs, code smells and to suggest improvements on somebody else code. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It would be best to practice code reviews as frequently as possible; however, the activity is very time-consuming and costly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An excellent way to increase the frequency of code reviews is to include static code analysis in the delivery pipeline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Static Code Analysis tools and solutions<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

There are instruments and solutions to implement static code analysis that can automatically scan your codebase and generate an accurate report for the developers. Such tools are usually easy to integrate as a step in the continuous delivery pipeline; usually, the return code can determine if the code is good enough or if the release fails the static analysis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, a fully automated solution cannot substitute a complete code review performed by a developer. Still, the increased ratio of code analysis plus the relatively cheap impact on overall pricing makes adding an analysis step to your pipeline an efficient way to improve code quality and security.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are three main categories of improvements that static code analysis can pinpoint:<\/p>\n\n\n\n