ICS 121: Style guides and analysis tools

Style guides are structured English documents that help the development team catch common errors and work together with less conflict.
Style guides can be applied to many software development artifacts:
- User interfaces: e.g., Microsoft UI guidelines, Java UI guidelines, Mac UI guidelines, W3C Accessibility guidelines
- Source code: e.g., Sun's java style guide, Sun's javadoc guide, PHPBuilder.com's PHP style guide
- UML and OO design: The Elements of UML Style, Object-Oriented Design Heuristics
Consistent coding style makes it easier for any developer on a team to edit any code.
- Makes developers more sure of variable and method names: size(), getSize(), get_size(), iGetSize(), sGetSize()
- Consistent indentation and expression spacing help make the code look the same to all developers
- Consistency helps avoid apparent differences between versions of source code. E.g., I changed one if-statement condition, but I also re-indented the entire program, can you understand my change in the version control log?

A source code style analyzer is a tool that reads source code and checks whether it follows the coding style guidelines.
Usually highly configurable to fit each team's style
Produces a report of the lines that violate the style.
Examples: Checkstyle, JLint (does more than just style)

A source code formatter is a tool that reads source code and outputs the same source code with consistent indentation and spacing.
Usually highly configurable to fit each team's style
Works well, so long as everyone is using the same tool.
Many IDEs have this function built-in.
Examples: jalopy, Tidy, GNU indent