Configure automatic QA with PMD, FindBugs and CheckStyle
mikaelhg opened this issue · 2 comments
We should start to systematically improve the code quality with each commit, as well as document the specific chosen standards.
The code base was originally created by very smart students, without the benefit of the decades of experience it normally takes to make these kinds of standards a part of every developer's baseline autopilot.
Therefore, turning on all of the best practises at once would create an unmanageable amount of work. Instead, we will start from very simple things, such as legibility and indentation, which encourage developers to go through the codebase manually, but without an obligation to fix everything at once, as well as the most critical FindBugs categories.
@taweili, @philippecade, @katjas, @laurentschall, have you bumped into anything specific you'd want autodetected on the first pass?
This is a good initiative, especially when several people are working on the code base. Nothing in particular that I would like to tackle first.
I think that we should however turn "everything" on to start and not do it gradually. This will indeed generate a lot of warnings but the advantage is that new code can be written according to all rules at the first revision, and we won't have to come back to it to correct it later when new rules are added. I don't think we should also focus on correcting everything right away, as we edit the files should be enough.
Most IDE can also help enforcing the rules and we should commit the configuration files that control this. Once you've chosen the rule set you would like to apply, I can find the corresponding Eclipse settings and commit them.