Exploring Violations of Programming Styles: Insights from Open Source Projects

Software project is usually a huge cooperative teamwork, programmers in the project usually have to read the code written by others and understand its implementation. A uniform and clean programming style could ensure the readability and maintainability of the project source code, especially when it becomes a legacy project. However, each programmer has his own programming habit and because of the heavy developing tasks, the programming style of the software project is far from satisfactory. Programming style does not resemble software defects which has a serious effect on program executing. Therefore, many programmers ignore the programming style directly instead of improving it. Programming style should be checked before new features are merged into software projects, just like software testing. Developing with the size of software project, some special programming style rules are violated more seriously, which need be highly focused. Furthermore, one of ultimate targets in software quality engineering is to check the programming style automatically with analysis tools because the software projects usually have an enormous quantity of source code. In this paper, static source code analysis is used for detecting the programming style problems. The source file directly or the. class files generated by the compiler are scanned then the abstract syntax tree for the source code is generated. With the help of abstract syntax tree, it is possible to detect code snippets that violate the programming style rules by traverse the tree. Our method employs the static code analysis tools to analyze several Java open source projects, and find that the programming style problems which are violated most. According to our method, each problem is also explained from personal habits, JDK version, and other aspects later. Considering all of the analysis results, a special ruleset that is recommended to pay more attention to in the future software developing is proposed. At last, programming style should be highly valued in software development processes in further project management.