Detecting JavaScript Errors and Code Smells with Static Analysis

JavaScript is the most commonly used programming language and has been at the top of the GitHub annual highlights. Its open source ecosystem will be much bigger as it is widely applied to developing server, mobile, and desktop applications beyond just websites.

While code bases written in JavaScript are larger, debugging and managing the code bases are getting more difficult especially due to the dynamic features of JavaScript language. But you can significantly reduce this quality cost by catching code defects at the earlier stage of the development cycle.

Static analysis tools come into play at this stage.

To help JavaScript folks find static analysis tools helpful, we rummaged our database regarding run-time errors and code smells found by our JavaScript static analysis tool. It was gathered by analyzing code from thousands of public JavaScript and TypeScript projects on GitHub.

This whitepaper describes how static analysis tools work and shows some types of problems that static analysis tools can prevent. Feel free to download the whitepaper for a look on how static analysis tools cope with the troubles of JavaScript.