Comparative Study of Static Code Analysis Tools for PHP
Diego Comis, Samuel Forrati, Elder Rodrigues de Macedo, Maicon Bernardino, João Pablo Silva da Silva · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2022
Static code analysis is a technique widely used for software verification and validation, which runs through pre-defined code snippets to identify defects and problems without the need to run the application. This article proposes to analyze these tools for the PHP programming language, based on the standard template project for the Federal Government of Brazil (eGOV) websites, developed for the Joomla and WordPress CMS, available for free on GitHub for each of these technologies. Thus, to achieve this objective, we select five tools among more than 70 found, using as criteria being open source static code analysis tool and having available documentation. Hence, we classify the tools according to their efficiency and effectiveness to evaluate them for two CMS projects. Further, we analyze indicators and graphs to make a comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of each one.