Visual Expert Web – Code Inspection
Code inspection in Visual Expert involves analyzing source code to find potential issues, errors, and areas for improvement. It helps developers improve code quality, follow coding standards, and optimize performance. With a complete set of tools, Visual Expert simplifies the code review process, making applications more reliable and efficient.
Key Features of Code Inspection
The dashboard shows key details such as the Key indicators, Issues found, Remediation cost, and Technical debt.
- Better Code Quality – Detects bugs, syntax errors, and structural issues to keep code clean, reliable, and easy to maintain.
- Improved Security – Finds security risks like SQL injection, hardcoded credentials, and access control issues.
- Faster Performance – Identifies slow queries, redundant loops, and memory-heavy operations so developers can make improvements.
- Lower Technical Debt – Helps teams prioritize code fixes to reduce long-term maintenance efforts.
- Automated Code Checks – Saves time by automating inspections, reducing the need for manual reviews.
- Impact Analysis & Dependency Tracking – Shows how code changes affect different parts of the application.
- Clear Reports & Suggestions – Provides detailed issue reports with cost estimates and recommended fixes.
- Informed Decision-Making – Displays issue severity, estimated fix times, and other key factors to help teams focus on important fixes.
- Search-Friendly – Allows filtering data by project, application, and programming language.
Sample Dashboard Overview
The sample dashboard includes two applications: PB and SQL sample projects.
- A – Shows combined results from both applications.
- B – Displays results and data for each application separately.
Code Inspection Sections
1. Reliability
The Reliability section identifies critical issues that could affect application stability. It includes a bug trends graph that tracks detected issues over time, helping developers assess code quality trends. Additionally, the cost and technical debt chart estimates the effort required to resolve these issues, allowing teams to plan their development priorities efficiently.
This section also provides a breakdown of inspection rules, showing which have passed or failed and the severity of each issue. A list of detected problems includes details on occurrence frequency, impact, and remediation costs, helping teams address the most pressing concerns first. By detecting logical inconsistencies, inefficient code structures, and missing conditions, this section plays a key role in improving software reliability and maintainability.
Clicking on any broken rule provides additional details for further analysis.
2. Security
The Security section analyzes potential vulnerabilities in the source code. The dashboard presents key security indicators, lists detected vulnerabilities, and ranks them by severity, helping teams prioritize fixes. By identifying security risks such as SQL injection threats, hardcoded credentials, and weak access controls, this section strengthens the overall security of applications.
3. Maintainability
The Maintainability section evaluates code complexity and readability, ensuring that it remains easy to modify, debug, and expand. It highlights issues such as overly complex functions, deeply nested loops, duplicated code, and large files, which can complicate future development efforts.
By providing key maintainability indicators—including technical debt and estimated remediation costs—this section helps developers refactor their code for better clarity and reduced redundancy. The goal is to keep the codebase structured, efficient, and easier to manage over time.
4. Issues Found
The Issues Found section provides a categorized overview of detected code issues, helping teams quickly identify and prioritize problems. Issues are grouped by:
- Severity: Critical, Major, Minor, Low
- Type: Vulnerability, Security Warning, Bug, Maintainability, Metric
- Group: Code Optimization, Code Redundancy, Migration PB Latest, Query Optimization, Security
By classifying issues based on their severity and impact, teams can focus on high-priority defects first, mitigating risks efficiently. This section also offers detailed insights into each issue, allowing developers to understand root causes and take corrective action to improve overall code quality.
5. Remediation Cost
The Remediation Cost section estimates the effort required to resolve detected issues, helping teams allocate resources effectively. Issues are categorized by severity, enabling teams to assess the time and effort needed for fixes.
By providing a clear breakdown of high-impact issues and their associated costs, this section helps developers prioritize the most critical fixes. Managing remediation costs effectively also contributes to reducing technical debt, ensuring long-term code stability and efficiency.
6. Technical Debt
The Technical Debt section quantifies the cost of unresolved code issues, categorizing them by severity. It provides insights into the long-term impact of accumulated technical debt on software performance, security, and maintainability.
By identifying problematic areas and estimating the effort required for remediation, teams can proactively manage development priorities and avoid future risks. Addressing technical debt in a timely manner ensures a more scalable, stable, and efficient codebase while minimizing maintenance efforts.
Additional Features
- Hovering over the Code Inspection Rules table shows additional information.
- Clicking on any broken rule provides details such as the description, benefits, non-compliant vs. compliant code, and issue specifics.