Integrated Development Environment Artificial Learning (IDEAL)

Complex software written by multiple developers and sometimes by multiple contributing companies, leads to difficulty ensuring all code complies with desired standards. As software complexity and size grows, the challenge to ensure compliance grows along with it. Modern computer software is a complex stack of interacting, related, but ultimately distinct code written by numerous developers at different times. This forms a complex system of systems, and for mission- and safety-critical code, all potential code interactions, intended or otherwise, must be considered. One present challenge is ensuring that developers follow code standards and produce less defects along the way. When an agency has specific and unique code standards, there are no automated tools available to compare code written for that agency with its code standards. Nor is there an available tool which can be configured to look for compliance with custom code standards. Automation code scanning tools do exist but are ill suited to an agency’s specific compliance checking, being focused on failure mode and vulnerability analysis, such as in software assurance, or on formatting and style checking. Noetic believes that to improve the resilience of mission-critical software, complex automated quality checks must become continuous, and they must empower the developer to write compliant code earlier in the process. Doing so requires building a programmatic understanding of the context of any given block of code, identifying all applicable standards that apply, and continuously checking the code for compliance with applicable standards. The best way to achieve these goals is by closely integrating the scanning solution with the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and build systems used by the agency. This integration allows engaging with the user, extracting important context, and iterating and tailoring the detection systems to the specific code base and developer in question. To this end, Noetic proposes the creation of Integrated Development Environment Artificial Learning (IDEAL). Approved for Public Release | 22-MDA-11340 (16 Dec 22)