Compliance means following a number of rules, in order to achieve normalisation, performance, portability, and more generally, quality. Many of such rules are dictated by common sense, such as requiring that programs follow some well-defined canvas. Other rules are specific to an environment, to a project or to an organisation. Naming conventions that standardise accesses to databases and forbid some kinds of statements considered as poor practice falls in this second category.

Up to now, enforcing compliance onto coding rules had merely been a matter of wishful thinking. Long and complex documents were being produced, and given as mandatory reading for anyone who wished to work in the IT departments of those quality-conscious organisations. The problem lied in the apparent impossibility to enforce these guidelines by any other mean than random sampling.

The fight to achieve quality is a constant one. As the volume of code grows, it gets harder to control the source code real estate. Under the pressure of time, programmers tend to neglect guidelines, postponing corrections to a hypothetical future. Then, programmers come and go, forget or misunderstand the guidelines. Organisations tend to use more and more external manpower, thereby hampering the enforcement of guidelines even further.

RainCode can check for guidelines automatically. It includes a number of such typical checks out of the box, but its true added value lies in the ability to implement checks specially tuned for an environment, an organisation or even, for a project.

Modus vivendi

RainCode can enforce compliance in two ways:

• In batch, producing reports about the status of a number of source files in terms of their level of compliance, sending emails, printing reports, etc... Such batch processing would typically happen overnight, so that a daily quality assessment can be produced.
  
  
• The guidelines checking process can be integrated in the compilation chain, rejecting all non-compliant source files before they can even enter the test phase.

External workforce and outsourcing

In the context of irregular work overloads (such as the "changeover to euro" problem) or as part of a trend of organisation to focus on their core business, more and more software gets developed and maintained by specialised external companies. In such cases, it is even more important to be able to measure and enforce quality through guidelines, since the individuals who work on the code can be unavailable as early as weeks after completion of the project.