ConQAT

The Continuous Quality Assessment Toolkit ( ConQAT ) is a highly configurable software quality analysis engine. ConQAT based on a Pipes & Filters architecture, which allows very flexible way to create complex analysis configurations by using a graphical configuration language. It thus differs from other analysis tools, which usually use a fixed data model and a fixed -implemented calculation logic.

Architecture

The ConQAT underlying Pipes & Filters architecture is in the analysis of configurations, called ConQAT blocks visible. These consist of a network of ConQAT processors or other blocks. This analysis can be configured to be flexibly adapted to the context of the analyzed software system. For example, can be treated differently different types of code ( manually developed code, generated code, test code ). This architecture processors, and blocks may be reused. For example, graph metrics can be calculated, regardless of whether the underlying graph is a dependency graph of a program, a control flow graph or a revision graph from a version management system.

Functions

ConQAT analyzes are usually performed on a command line in batch mode. Besides its use in software quality audits, it is used often embedded in the nightly build of a software system. ConQAT offers processors (called scopes ) for reading information from different sources, such as source code or binary code files and issue trackers or version management systems. For many languages ​​(Java, C #, C / C , etc. ABAP ) lexical analyzer processors and other preprocessing steps are provided to it to perform different analyzes. ConQAT implemented algorithms for detecting redundancy, architecture analysis, etc. in their own processors / blocks, also it ties established tools, such as FindBugs, FxCop, etc. on processors that read the output format. Although ConQAT different output formats are supported (eg XML), are usually used to output generated HTML files to display the analysis results. Be embedded in visualizations, such as different types of charts, tree maps, architecture diagrams, etc.

Background

ConQAT is developed at the Technical University of Munich since 2007 and received by several publications on its architecture as well as on individual analysis methods, such as the detection of redundancy ( clone recognition ), architectural conformity analyzes notoriety. Since 2009 ConQAT is being developed jointly by the Technical University of Munich and the CQSE GmbH, a company spun off from the original research group spin-off company, as an open source project. In particular, the research area of the redundancy detection (Clone Detection) to source code and models ConQAT is now used by several international research groups as the basic technology.