Lockdowns across the globe are ending. Meanwhile, Duplicate Code Detection (DCD) is just getting started, as we introduce our refreshed v101.Despite being home-bound these past few months, we’ve been working tirelessly on delivering a new technical preview for our enterprise developers. This newest refresh introduces a greater level of ease when searching for meaningful code duplicates, even in the largest of code bases.
Code reduction continues to be a key strategy to reducing inherent code defects. But ensuring that code maintenance changes have been successfully applied in all situations is not so straightforward. There has always been the risk that a change hasn't been fully carried out. And we know, it’s always that single defect that leads to a system error later in the development lifecycle.
But by refactoring code, you ensure a reduction, and in many cases, a total elimination of code duplication in your code base. Taking these steps will solidify your applications and systems against defects so that the enterprise can continue to deliver value to the customer and maintain an edge on the competition.
We can all agree, that empowering developers so they may take swift action against defective code and prevent duplication of data sharing is a good thing. However, we are aware that only a small portion of the enterprise’s code base reaches a development environment; and this is a problem. Much of an enterprise’s code is running or awaiting modification so that it complies with new requirements, it is in constant motion. And because this code is never really static, we introduced enhanced team capabilities in Duplicate Code Detection.
But with the introduction of the Duplicate Code Detection server, you can now provide development teams with remote search capabilities for code duplication throughout your entire system. And of course, these search capabilities provide unique results at the speed you’ve come to expect on IBM Z. Duplicate Code Detection analyzes your entire enterprise code base and returns results that are unique to the individual team member. No other solution does this so elegantly and simply.
We’ve come a long way since the first introduction of Duplicate Code Detection, earlier this year. The feedback we received from you was what motivated us to deliver a refresh so quickly. And in this refresh, as in with our other offerings, these new Duplicate Code Detection enhancements are centered around themes. In this release we focus on the following three main themes:
- Refinements to COBOL grammar when handling synonyms and unnecessary words or characters (PIC and PICTURE, for example, will no longer be seen as different words) in code duplication detection
- Graphical enhancements designed to ease the manipulation of code duplication searches, previews and editions (You will even be able to define resource sets for your duplicate searches)
- Remote searches for code duplication in Engineering Workflow Manager (formerly RTC) source code management systems (SCM)
- Much like Git, searching with source code stored in EWM brings with it the ability to work in modern SCMs, while also maintaining confidence that code quality that can always be shared
Duplicate Code Detection showing code duplicates and search results in IDz
But that’s not all folks. These enhanced Duplicate Code Detection features have been designed to fit perfectly into your automated Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline to build code duplication indexes. As the adoption of CI/CD increases it is critical that enterprise developers remain keenly aware of their code quality and potential code duplication throughout the entire lifecycle.
These are exciting times to develop for the IBM Z platform, and Duplicate Code Detection is a necessary ingredient. Duplicate Code Detection can help keep your enterprise code base secure and make it more transparent for your enterprise developers. And don’t forget, we’d love to hear about your experience with Duplicate Code Detection. We want to learn what works best when you are fully managing and ensuring your code, and not the other way around!
And here are some useful links for you to get started:
- Vote on our future thoughts here
- Installation guide and other tutorials for DCD here