RE: [Bodington-developers] download this and frighten yourself

[Peter C. <Pet...@me...>]

> From: Alistair Young [mailto:ali...@sm...]=20
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/pmd/

Ah, a picky code analyser.  Useful on any project that is concerned
about code quality.

> I just ran it with some rulesets on head - eeeeek!

I'm not frightened by this, more resigned to it.  It's entirely
unsurprising for a project of this age, with this many contributors,
where there has been a continual focus on getting the required pieces to
work rather than on overall code quality.

The more interesting questions are whether we want to do anything about
it (hopefully yes!) and, if we do, whether the effort required for the
clean-up is expended at one time (but we have a known cleaner codebase
to go on from), or whether an individual working on an area should have
the responsibility for cleaning up that area.  A big-bang will probably
save overall effort in the long term, at the cost of a hiatus in
development as effort goes into cleaning up poor code.

If we're ever to break up the monolith, I suspect it would be easier to
start from code that was cleaner.  PMD, or other similar tools, could
help us to get to that stage.

		- Peter

P.S. At the risk of sounding like a broken record: http://cc2e.com.
I've been coding for 30 years, including hard real-time and
mission-critical projects, and I learned plenty of new stuff (and
resolved to change some old habits) from this book.