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by logn 4809 days ago
As much as people feel negatively about Java, it really has fantastic static code analysis tools. PMD, FindBugs, CheckStyle are all very helpful when properly configured. They're basically on the checklist level.

I think checklist level thinking for code reviews is bad though. It ends up being a pretty soul destroying experience when someone tells you that you need to validate arguments to all methods as not null (for the 100 you wrote), or that you should take the data in your test cases and put it in a text file. Or that you've re-used the same string in several places and should make it constant. Robots can tell me that, and I can get their feedback while I'm developing or choose to ignore it. People are invaluable for helping you step back and see how to re-organize your code, introduce new abstractions, re-interpret requirements, and see actual bugs that no QA person or tool would ever discover (likely affecting some unlucky user who would hit an extremely rare bug that couldn't be reproduced easily). Those types of reviews are invaluable. Put down the checklist and automate it instead.
3 comments
Joeri 4808 days ago
To be fair, there are similar tools for most languages.

One of the most comprehensive tools for doing automated quality reviews of code is Sonar ( http://www.sonarsource.org/ ). It supports pretty much all programming languages (thought not all for free).

For example, for PHP code sonar runs a combination of PHP_CodeSniffer, PHPMD, phpDepend and phpunit and integrates the reporting of all those tools.

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obviouslygreen 4809 days ago
As much as people feel negatively about Java, it really has fantastic static code analysis tools.

My first experience with Java was at a job in high school... and my only reference was a book that weighed half as much as I did. Needless to say it left me with a very, very poor impression of the language, which I'm only recently learning is very much wrong.

I definitely prefer writing Python, but the more I actually learn about Java, the worse I feed for being such a senseless detractor for so many years.

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fyi80 4809 days ago
The checklist motivates the automation. This advice is for people who have neither, to get started.
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