Comments on sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand: Enforcing Ruby code quality

Thanks Jean-Michel. Simon Harris, who wrote Simia...

2009-09-15T16:57:47.506-07:00

Thanks Jean-Michel. Simon Harris, who wrote Simian, happens to work with me at Cogent :) I've let him know about your gem.

Regarding dupplication, I wrote a gem which genera...

2009-09-15T02:26:21.576-07:00

Regarding dupplication, I wrote a gem which generate reports (HTML, Textmate, Netbeans, etc …) of identical duplicate lines, backed by java tool Simian.

http://wiki.github.com/garnierjm/dont_repeat_yourself

No problems at all Felipe. Good luck with your to...

2009-06-15T16:30:30.998-07:00

No problems at all Felipe. Good luck with your tool!

Great post! You just inspired me to make a simple ...

2009-06-14T14:28:37.130-07:00

Great post! You just inspired me to make a simple continuous integration app for RubyOnRails, at http://github.com/felipegiotto/Inotegration

Hope you don't mind! I've taken your ideas, but I put your name on the credits! :D If you're interested, download the code at Github and send some feedback!

Best regards,

Felipe Giotto.

Good post. Thank you.

2009-06-11T22:59:10.789-07:00

Good post. Thank you.

PMD has a similar feature (max rule violations). ...

2009-05-31T05:30:46.214-07:00

PMD has a similar feature (max rule violations).

You don't just use the number of violations; you need to combine this info with an actual violation report to get any use out of it.

The way we implemented this before with Checkstyle was to check the XML violations report into SVN. We then set the build up to use SVN diff to differentiate between which violations you had just introduced and which were already there.

Each run would effectively clobber the violations report file so that if you removed violations as part of the build it would also be removed from the versioned report. If there were no changes then SVN wouldn't detect a content change.

I'm thinking of blogging a more specific recipe to detail how we achieved this using Ant and Checkstyle (aint that pretty though).

You say "Most style checking tools like Checkstyle...

2009-05-30T19:02:43.861-07:00

You say "Most style checking tools like Checkstyle have the ability to set a maximum violations figure". Do you know of any others? How do you know which violations they are?

Don't get me wrong. I like the idea, but I think it's only half way towards the real solution, which should know exactly what fails, and automatically remove them from the acceptable violations list once they've been refactored.

When faced with a choice of not enforcing, or enforcing at a level just higher than my current code, I choose the latter.

Great post, I didn't even know that there was this...

2009-05-30T16:12:16.117-07:00

Great post, I didn't even know that there was this much tool support for quality analysis in Ruby.

One thing I never liked though was having to set my check levels at just one tick above the worst spot in my code. This means there is nothing stopping anyone from checking in code that is as bad as what you currently have. I like my style rules to describe my current idea of good quality code whether my existing code conforms or not.

One solution (if the tool or your own hand rolling supports it) is to set a violation threshold (accounting for your existing code) and then set your rules at the ideal levels. This stops anyone from checking in code that doesn't pass muster while you are cleaning up other areas of your codebase.

I blogged about this on the same day at http://fuglylogic.com/2009/05/29/keeping-on-the-tail-of-code-quality-with-a-ratchet/