Code analysis is good; some code analyzers are closer to my definition of useful
I quite like LGTM since it doesn’t tend to flag up that many false positives when scanning your code. The problem with a lot of the code analysis tools like spotbugs, sonarqube, codacy etc1 is that they often apply rules without understanding the context or the style of the code in question; having false positives as shown2 is frustrating, and invariably ends up with a large number of customised rule configurations for any new static code analysis tool, or in fact ignoring the tool completely and marking it as worse than useless (which isn’t helpful either).
Other code analysis tools are available, like scrutinizr, PMD, etc ↩︎
You can argue this is a style thing; but this is absolutely a false positive. ↩︎
Pictures make people think you care about documentation!
What I’ve often noticed is that javadocs are kind of treated as a second class citizen when it comes a lot of opensource projects; not all projects, there are some with excellent javadocs; but, sadly, more often than not javadocs are an afterthought. Now, I’m as guilty as the next person for not having great javadocs; but you can spruce up your javadocs with some pretty UML diagrams courtesy of plantuml, graphviz and umldoclet…
Why not both, you shouldn’t have to choose; in this instance choice is useful
I try to be consistent in my development environments since they are spread across a number of platform: Windows, Linux and latterly Mac because McAfee sucked the performance out of my corporate issued laptop. I’m one of those odd people who happens to use all 3 major platforms actively for development. Scripts have always been bash, which means that I need to be able to run bash on my Windows systems; a long time ago it was Cygwin, but I found I didn’t need many of the features that it provided so I ended up using the bash that’s provided by Git for Windows; I have found that I need rsync to be available to make vagrant provision machines properly. I also like a bit of Windows subsystem for Linux so I have the choice of either installing my tools via scoop.sh or sudo apt-get. Sadly scoop hasn’t persuaded me that powershell is my goto shell.
Thinking pays off later; procrastination pays off right now…
Should you do it now or should you do it later? Strike while the iron’s hot or wait and see? In the context of development, this isn’t always an easy decision. You may not have the bandwidth or resources to finish that uber-feature right now when you have customers breathing down your neck about bugs that really should be classified as feature requests. You can opt to develop a solution that is tactical and not strategic; deferring those strategic decisions until some later time is a perfectly valid and meaningful form of planning. The biggest issue with deferring a decision is that circumstances can take the momentum away from you, and dictate any future path that you can take.
Unit tests are like QA, backups and disaster recovery; you don’t need it until you need it
Unit tests are good; that’s the accepted truth and you won’t find many developers that disagree with that statement. Yet we live in a world where there are projects running in production that don’t have unit tests. In fact, having crap tests, like having unmaintained documentation, is, in any reasonably complex codebase, arguably worse than having no tests at all. What then is the point of unit tests? Subjectively, I find that unit tests can be used as a measure of understanding what you’re trying to deliver.
