Customers tell us frequently that they appreciate our weekly builds. They provide a constant stream of new features and bug fixes to Understand users. We like weekly builds because it means we don’t have to provide patch binaries to customers in dire need of an update and also because we hate the idea of a crash or bug existing in the wild longer than necessary.

But what do we do with new capabilities that we want feedback on, but aren’t quite “production ready”? We faced this with Understand 2.0, which had lots of new features/capabilities.  Frankly, I think we took too long getting feedback and had to redo more than we would have liked once we did get user experiences.

Going foward we have big plans for Understand and the core technology it is based on. And so that we can get rapid feedback, we will be exposing features much earlier than we have in the past using a vehicle called “Scitools Labs”.

Scitools Labs isn’t some effort to make us look bigger than we are. We are still the 20 something person company we’ve always been.  Instead, it is our way of asking… “this is where we are heading, what do you think?”.

Build 471, which will be released tomorrow, includes three Scitools Labs features:

• Dependence Analysis, Graphing and metrics for files and architectures
• Stack Analysis specific to Microchip Corporation’s compiler/micro-controllers
• UnderstandYourCode.Com – a website hosting free tools, online analysis and new web oriented features we are putting into Understand.

I’ll write more specifically about each new Scitools Labs technology in blog postings prefixed with “Scitools Labs:“.

And remember, your input is the whole idea, so don’t be shy – let us know what you think.

Build 470, released today, introduces beta support for VHDL.  E-mail support@scitools.com for instructions on how to enabble that support.

About 1/2 our engineers program on Linux. A couple use the Mac. And the rest use Windows.

On Linux and the Mac it is quite common to have command line GDB session in use for debugging and to need to inspect or walk a call stack from the “where” command.  It is a bit of a pain to have these separated from Understand. And we may (if we can figure out the Windows side) add debugging support directly into Understand, but until here is a tip that makes working with GDB a bit easier.

With B465 you paste any text into a command result window (get one by choosing “Options->Run a command”).  Once pasted, we analyze it for file, line and entity names and it becomes clickable for Understand events and menus.

Here is a GDB call stack pasted in:

Files and lines are identified so I can visit them in Understand, or right click and get information and graphs.

Also, with B465 we have made file detection much smarter. It will recognize short, relative and full path names and associate line numbers with them in any fashion a compiler or other tool can think to spit them out.

Searching in graphs has been on my Understand wish list since we first added graphs – 10 years ago!

So I’m quite happy to report that Understand 2.0 Build 466 has searching in graphs. To search in a graph just hit the binocular button and enter in the search text. It is incremental. As you type, it matches. Hit return to move to the next, or use the green arrows. The graph will center to the next match. Searches will find on node labels and edge labels (if the graph has them).

Here I search a large call tree for “inflate”:

Your code is beautiful, formatted to your liking and spaced just how you want it, but sometimes you have to work with other people’s code – yuck! If only there was something that would make it look like your code, instead of spaghetti. Artistic Style, or astyle as it is also known, is a great open source application that does exactly that.

So you can quickly turn this:

Into this:

We plan on implementing astyle into the editor at some point in the future, but I’m not so patient, and I decided to use our plugin mechanism to do it now, and will show you how.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was just doing technical support for one of our site license customers. It occurred to me that many folks don’t know that is an option. Doing a site license has these benefits:

• quite low unit pricing
• easy availability of Understand to when engineers move in and out of projects
• much easier licensing (no license manager, it just works on your IP ranges or domains)

If your site might be interested just contact Sue or Kevin at sales@scitools.com to learn cost and technical options.

We are always on the lookout for new ways to represent source code. Word Clouds caught my fancy.

Here is one of our own source code showing the top 50 most complex functions in source tree.

We thought doing Classes by lines of code, Classes by Sum Complexity and Architectures by the same might also be interesting.

Q: Worth adding to Understand?

BTW: The Cloud was generated by Wordle.net.  We wrote a script that generates output that can be pasted into its text box.   I’ve attached it in case you want to try it on your own code.
File Attachment: wordart.pl.zip

So imagine you’re reviewing metrics for a small function:

  61 lines of code, pretty small, keeping functionality nice and modular. Good.

  Cyclomatic complexity of 30. Highly complex, but within the acceptable range. Good.

  CountPath metric 536,870,912. What is this? 536 Million paths in 61 lines of code, that can’t be right, can it?!?

Read the rest of this entry »

Several people have asked me lately about automating metrics with Understand 2.0. There are two quick ways to automate metrics, as a scheduled activity and via the command line:

Read the rest of this entry »

I was walking down to the kitchen to get my afternoon cookie and I met another of our engineers. He asked “hey, how would I use Understand to clean up a class of functions that are no longer used?”. I thought for a bit and said “piece of cake”.

In short…. use the entity filter window to filter on “unused functions”, turn entity->long names on, then type in the name of the class. Done. 

Here are the steps….  First select the “Unused Functions” filter in the Entity Filter window:

Read the rest of this entry »