Flow Check Reports

The Flow Checks are a series of reports providing insight into program behavior and identifying potential problem areas in your software. This is achieved by using static analysis to follow the program control flow over multiple levels and to track how data is manipulated during these execution paths. Applying such static analysis to a whole program looking at all variables and all possible execution paths is called global data flow analysis.

The first group of reports, the Variable Flow Checks, focus on issues of variable usage. They show the calculations that effect the value of a variable, and identify such issues as variables that are not set or read and variables that are read before they are initialized.

The Task Flow Checks focus on behavior of multi-tasking, multi-threaded software. In particular, they analyze data sharing and how shared data flows between tasks. The Task Flow Checks flag potential conflicts in areas such as data access, concurrency control, and cyclical data updates.

Advanced Topics: See Data Flow Analysis for further information about data flow analysis and a detailed description of each of the flow check reports.