“SoftWipe” – open-source tool and benchmark to assess the quality of scientific software

Digital tools are essential in almost all scientific disciplines. Reliable, carefully developed software is particularly important when large amounts of research data accumulate and must be processed quickly to analyze the data and interpret it correctly – for example in biology, physics or currently also in epidemiology. To evaluate the software quality automatically, the Computational Molecular Evolution (CME) group designed the “SoftWipe” tool.

SoftWipe – tool and benchmark for assessing coding standards’ adherence

SoftWipe is a pipeline, written in Python3, that predominantly uses freely available static and dynamic code analyzers to assess the code quality of software written in C/C++. SoftWipe initially compiles the software and subsequently executes the software to detect potential errors. Using the output of the static code analyzers, SoftWipe computes a score for each static analyzer and then outputs an overall score.

The tool is available on GitHub: https://github.com/adrianzap/softwipe

References:

Paper: Zapletal, A., Höhler, D., Sinz, C. et al.: The SoftWipe tool and benchmark for assessing coding standards adherence of scientific software. Sci Rep 11, 10015 (2021).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-89495-8

Press Release: https://www.h-its.org/2021/05/21/cme-softwipe/