On 2014-06-04, 00:53, Andy Isaacson wrote:
If the auditor at any point says "Well, I wouldn't have *recommended* that you implement your JSON parsing in ad-hoc C with pointer arithmetic and poor and misleading comments, but I can't find any *bugs* so I guess it must be OK" then that is an immediate fail.
And that I think is going too far. There might be perfectly valid reasons to do what the developer did, and saying post-hoc that you fail the audit because you don't like some design choices opens the door to personal biases. (Good luck, for example, trying to write nontrivial C without at least some form of pointer arithmetic.) If you fail the audit, it's your duty as a professional auditor to provide evidence that there is something actually wrong with the software. It's OK to single out some pieces of code for closer inspection because of code smells, but if you try your darnedest to find something wrong with it and can't, then either the code is OK or you're not good enough an auditor. In either case, you can flag the code, you can recommend rewriting it according to what you think is better style, but you can't in good conscience fail the audit. Fun, Stephan