Adhere to an external coding standard.

If Bug Finder supports the coding standard, you can select the standard and a predefined or custom set of rules from the standard.

Polyspace Bug Finder™ supports these external standards directly. For these standards, simply enable the standard in your configuration and start analysis.

See Check for and Review Coding Standard Violations.

Develop a set of in-house coding rules based on external standards and prior issues found.

See if you can automate checking of those rules through Bug Finder defect checkers and/or external coding standard checkers.

One way to locate a potential checker is to search by keywords in the documentation. Suppose you want to detect issues that can arise from use of variadic functions.

You can record each defect checker that you enabled or disabled for your process requirements. You can start from the spreadsheet of checkers in polyspaceroot\polyspace\resources\. In the Your Notes column, note down your rationale for enabling or disabling a checker.

Check only for defects (bugs) that are most likely to cause errors at run time.

You might not be following standard coding practices in your organization and you might find external coding standards too sweeping for your preferences.

Start from the Bug Finder defect checkers and identify a subset of checkers for which you want to have zero unjustified defects. One way to identify this subset can be the following:

See also Choose Specific Bug Finder Defect Checkers.

You can follow a similar strategy with checkers for external coding standards. For instance, for MISRA C:2012, you can start from the mandatory or required guidelines and then choose to expand later.

Build configuration (sources, targets, and so on) — Save all options related to your build in an options file buildOptions.txt. You can create this file manually or automatically from your build command (makefile). For more information on how to create this file, see Specify Target Environment and Compiler Behavior.

Defect checkers and external coding standard configuration — Specify checkers configuration in a checkers configuration file.

Create a custom coding standard (.pschk) — Suppose you want to collect and organise the identified rules into an in-house coding standard. To create this custom coding standard, specify the coding rules that comprises the standard in a SARIF file and then use the command polyspace-catalog-bundler. This command produces a pschk file that you can use with the Polyspace Platform user interface or at the command line. To specify a custom coding standard CustomCodingStandard.pschk, at the command line, enter

polyspace-bug-finder -options-file buildOptions.txt -checkers-activation-file CustomCodingStandard.pschk

Create a checkers activation file (.xml) — Suppose you want to enable a set of external coding rules and Bug Finder defects using a single checkers activation file. You can create this XML using the Checkers Selection window. To open this window, at the command line, enter

polyspace-checkers-selection

If you prefer to use a text editor to create the XML file, start with example activation files located in the folder polyspaceroot\polyspace\examples\doc_cxx\checkers_activation_XML\.

After creating the activation file, specify it as an input to Checkers activation file (-checkers-activation-file). For example, to use the checkers activation file checkers.xml, at the command line, enter:

polyspace-bug-finder -options-file buildOptions.txt -checkers-activation-file checkers.xml

Create an options file — Suppose you want to keep selection of Bug Finder defects and external coding standards separate from each other. In this case, the checkers configuration file is an options file Defects_Coding_Rules that consists of two parts:

Once you select your defects and coding standards, the options file Defects_Coding_Rules might looks like this:

-checkers 
  INT_ZERO_DIV, 
  FLOAT_ZERO_DIV, 
-misra3 from-file
-autosar-cpp14 from-file 
-checkers-selection-file externalRuleCheckers.xml

polyspace-bug-finder -options-file buildOptions.txt -options-file Defects_Coding_Rules

In a Jenkins build, you can specify the run command in a build script, along with other tools that you are running. After code submission, the Polyspace analysis can run on newly submitted code through the build scripts.

In Polyspace as you Code IDE extensions, you can use the checkers activation file (.XML) or the custom coding standard (.pschk) directly in your IDE.

In developer IDEs, you can specify the run command through a menu item that runs external tools. Developers can run the Polyspace analysis during coding by using the external tools.