The RainCode Checker is a line of products dedicated to the automatic verification of coding guidelines.

Why Have Coding Guidelines in the first place ?

Code conventions are important to programmers for a number of reasons:

• 80% of the lifetime cost of a piece of software goes to maintenance.
• Hardly any software is maintained for its whole life by the original author.
• Code conventions improve the readability of the software, allowing engineers to understand new code more quickly and thoroughly.
• If you ship your source code as a product, you need to make sure it is as well packaged and clean as any other product you create.

The Product

The RainCode Checker allows to verify that the sources of a project satisfy a set of coding guidelines. Thanks to its Eclipse integration, the tool can be used either during the development phase of the project as a continuous quality enforcement tool. In this contexts, the RainCode Checker can be used by the project manager to displays trends of the project coding offenses.

The RainCode Checker can also be used as an acceptance tool to ensure that software delivered by third parties respect the imposed coding standards.

The RainCode Checker comes with a set of predefined rules, but it provides a complete infrastucture to adapt the coding rules to the project specific needs. This architecture can be used to

• Enable or disable rules
• Adapt rules to match the project needs
• Create new rules according to the project needs
• Create new rules sets to handle several projects

The RainCode Checker produces extensive PDF reports, that can be included in compliance documents to certify that the code has been checked against a well-documented set of coding guidelines.

The RainCode Checker comes with a portable graphical user interface for convenient setup: defining checking projects, enabling or disabling individual rules, etc. Conversely, the checker can be run in unattended batch mode to allow automation of the coding guideline checks.

The results of the coding session are stored in a database to allow to integrate with the existing company process, for instance, to create web-based reports or to export check results to Excel sheets.

Supported platforms and languages

The RainCode Checker is available for the following languages:

• Ada
• C
• C++
• COBOL