SC for Eclipse Cobol

Control at the source your Cobol development quality

In order to optimize the quality of the code, SC for Eclipse (delivered as an Eclipse Plug-in and integrated with Cobos) controls the quality of the Cobol programs. Developers run the code analysis command and SC for Eclipse will check that development rules and defined programming standards are respected. Any violation against those rules will be highlighted for correction. Get now your evaluation license key!

        

Rules and standards are organized in 6 domains

  • Too many branchings (PERFORM or GO TO)
  • DB2 – Cursors must be declared in WORKING-STORAGE Section
  • Too many paragraphs
  • Program too big
  • Avoid paragraphs without statement
  • Avoid sections without paragraph
  • Paragraph too big
  • PERFORM THRU – Range of paragraphs over several sections
  • Too many paragraphs
  • BLOCK CONTAINS 0 RECORDS clause missing
  • GO TO outside of the PERFORM range
  • DB2 – Keywords forbidden in WHERE clauses
  • Avoid OCCURS 1 clauses
  • DB2 – Functions involving columns
  • DB2 – ‘for FETCH ONLY’ or ‘for READ ONLY’ clauses are recommanded for cursors open in read mode
  • Low comment rate for the program
  • Low comment rate for the paragraph
  • PROGRAM-ID must be identical to name of the source file
  • Commentarized code line
  • File not used
  • Indentation of EVALUATE statements
  • Forbidden statement (ALTER)
  • Table index format
  • Programming : file records must be described in COPY files
  • LK Section – It is advisable not to use the VALUE clause
  • Only one statement per line
  • Forbidden statement (ALTER)
  • DB2 – Do not use prefixes for DB2 tables or views
  • DB2 – SELECT without WHERE clause or SELECT * are forbidden
  • COPY : keyword VALUE forbidden in a COPY invoked in LINKAGE SECTION
  • GO TO generating a JUMP OUT OF PERFORM RANGE
  • DB2 SQL error handling : test SQLcode after a SQL statement
  • CICS error handling : returncode test after an EXEC CICS statement

The analysis process results in a « program maturity level » that depends on the severity of the violated rules (on a 0-5 scale). Violation severities are defined by the Cobos administrator. The objective is to focus improvement efforts on the most critical violations.

A maturity objective can be defined for a given project. It is then possible to implement a condition for blocking a program or issuing an alert if the predefined maturity objective is not met by the programs in order to prevent any non conformant program to go in production (or even to be compiled), in order to reduce the risk of production defects.

SC for Eclipse computes other metrics such as « Effort » (number of required violation corrections for improving a program maturity level by 1) which allows the project manager to assess the maintenance cost, or « Mark » that represents the global quality level of the program with respect to a given reference…

 

Get your free evaluation license

In order to receive your 60 days evaluation license of SC for Eclipse Cobol (Code Quality Plug-in within Cobos), please fill the form below.