Day: 1 November 2011

In the beginning A long time ago, before the days of code prettifiers like Jalopy, we wrote code and we tested code. That code was fun to write. And because it was fun to write, we were motivated to write it well and test it well. Welcome Jalopy It was around 2008 when a powerful tool which auto-magically reformatted our code was forced on us. In the beginning we rejoiced, for this tool added "TODO: Document me!" to all methods missing Javadoc (lots). It made it very easy to see where programmers had failed to document their code. The numerous TODOs were also great, because they made it impossible to find the real meaty stuff that still needed to be done. And in classes where our constants were defined, in a specific order so that it matched our documentation, Jalopy kindly reordered the constants alphabetically, making it hard to match code to the documentation. Enter Sonar A while later, realising that programmers program bad code even though Jalopy is present to save the world, we had Sonar forced on us. It is a great tool, because it tells us how bad our code is and what we need to change in order to make it good. Ahhh, what is "good" I hear you ask? Well that is defined by a central department who knows nothing of our projects and who doesn't care about architecture (where our real problems lie). The people who work there only want drones who all program…

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