Refactoring Made Easier

JetBrains TeamCity is a build management and continuous integration platform which supports .NET and Java. Having set up TeamCity and played with it for a couple of weeks, I’m very impressed by the slick UI and features provided out of the box. These include a set of code quality features.   Even better is the fact that the professional version is free.

One of the things that really impressed me is the duplicates finder. As the name suggests it detects duplicate code and currently works with Java, C# [up to 2.0] and VB [up to 8.0].  This helps you target the areas that need refactoring.

Alongside the duplicates [Java example above] a ‘cost’ is calculated. I’m not sure of the algorithm used, but it seems fairly sensible and the cost has some relation to the amount of code that is repeated. You can use this to help prioritise your refactoring. To setup your build simply set the runner to be the duplicates finder.

Standards and Guidelines are Useless

That is quite a bold statement I just made, but bear with me. I’ve come to the opinion that all standards, guidelines and best practices are useless if they only exist in a document somewhere. Invariably this document gets lost down the back of the enterprise sofa weeks after its initial distribution. Developers stop refering to it, it goes out of date and new developers are unaware of its existence.

The good news is that this problem can be solved quite simply. Automation is the answer and it places even more importance in having a sensible CI [Continuous Integration] strategy. All of the things that are truly important to the quality of your code can be automated. Standards and guidelines can be checked. By integrating these checks into your build platform developers receive regular feedback that they are more likely to act upon. Nightly builds can be set up to provide a full suite of information about adherence to standards and guidelines along with build health. These can include for example the standard stuff such as unit test coverage alongside naming convention, web accessibility & code readability checks. When the standard or guideline is changed developers get feedback about this at worst by the next day.

By eliminating waste in the feedback loop and ensuring that code is tested against the standards in place, you will quickly start to see the real effect of these standards and take an agile approach to evolving them to improve your codebase.