donm@margot.Eng.Sun.COM (Don Miller) (02/22/91)
In article <1991Feb19.145843.2842@ukpoit.co.uk> ian@ukpoit.co.uk (Ian Spare) writes: >I have been approached by a member of our Quality Assurance group with a view >to setting up some of C programming standards iand procedures for internal use. > I just came across a book which should prove an excellent resource for the questions posed. Frakes, William B., Fox, Christopher J., and Nejmeh, Brian A. Software Engineering in the UNIX/C Environment. Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1991. Frakes is from the Software Productivity Consortium, Fox is at Bell Labs, and Nejmeh is from someplace called Instep Incorporated. >We feel these standards/procedures should cover the following areas: > > o - Use of utilities such as make , lint etc ( other suggestions > are welcome). Although it doesn't provide enough information on any one utility to use as an instruction handbook, it contains references to and example uses of make, lint, cat, grep, cut, sort, awk, grep, egrep, bc, cpp, sed, time, vi, emacs, cscope, cb (indent), diff, lex, yacc, sdb, dbx, dbxtool, ctrace. lprof, tcov, etc., etc., etc., as well as many utilities whose availability is restricted. They describe the operation and use of these restricted tools as well so they can be written if need be (or grabbed from a friendly neighborhood ftp site). It does all this in the context of a prototype software development effort for a metrics tool called "ccount", which they provide the source for at the end of the book. I don't know about electonic availability of the source. It also addresses some areas where you may want to investigate tools from CASE vendors (it uses Software through Pictures from IDE as an example). > > o - Some guidelines for programming style. It does a reasonable job of presenting C issues to be aware of; not only style, but usage as well. > > o - Operating system interaction. See the section on utilities above. The C part addresses such nasty stuff as testing code which handles system call failures such as a null pointer returned from malloc. > > o - Use of standard libaries and system calls. It addresses functions available on a general level and uses thereof. > > o - Implications of standards such as POSIX and X-OPEN. Nobody's perfect. I'd like a reference to standards programs if you find a good one. > > o - How to do it - production of zero defect software. The greatest thing about this book is that all the tools are presented in the context of actual use. Although such a presentation is not ideal for becoming an expert on any individual tool, it provides an excellent framework for understanding the implication of this environment across the entire range of software engineering functions. I think those of us lucky enough ;-) to be working in the UNIX/C environment have found a reference that can serve as a springboard to a productive process. A good place to continue this discussion is probably comp.software-eng, so I've cross-posted there. -- Don Miller | #include <std.disclaimer> Software Quality Engineering | #define flame_retardent \ Sun Microsystems, Inc. | "I know you are but what am I?" donm@eng.sun.com |