Abstract
The software for the ATLAS experiment on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN has evolved over many years to meet the demands of Monte Carlo simulation, particle detector reconstruction and data analysis. At present over 3.8 million lines of C++ code (and close to 6 million total lines of code) are maintained by an active worldwide developer community. To run the experiment software efficiently it is essential to maintain a high level of software quality standards. The methods proposed to improve software quality practices by incorporating checks into the new ATLAS software build infrastructure will be discussed.
Highlights
The regular application of software quality tools in large collaborative projects is required to keep software defects to an acceptable level
The software for the ATLAS experiment on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN has evolved over many years to meet the demands of Monte Carlo simulation, particle detector reconstruction and data analysis
Defects such as redundant code paths and errors of omission are often viewed as minor transgressions from the perspective of the individual developer and may not be flagged by compilers as part of the software build process
Summary
The regular application of software quality tools in large collaborative projects is required to keep software defects to an acceptable level. A wide range of software quality tools are used by the developer community in the ATLAS collaboration to identify, track and resolve any defects in their code. A limited selection of static code analysis tools (namely cppcheck [2] and Coverity [3]) are used to perform periodic scans across main development branches to provide scheduled notifications to code maintainers on any defects that require urgent resolution.
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