Improving quality of your work
In these days of rapid development, and increasingly complex RIA applications, quality of code is more important than ever. Being complex applications, means that tracking down and fixing bugs in your system will be increasingly time consuming.
There are a lot of ways to help your self to write better quality code. One of such is to select a framework and adhere to the rules of that framework, thereby ensuring that your code is consistent throughout the entire application and equally important, consistent throughout the entire development team. I will not go in to the whole framework debate in this post, just quickly mention that for my part the PureMVC framwork has proven tedious and complicated to use in a consistent fashion..
Another measure you can take, to ensure higher code quality is code review. This technique ensures that no sloppy code enters production. This however can be a very tedious task if performed manually. It has also dawned on me as being (at least for most part of your day to day coding scenarios) somewhat stupid, as the quality of the code should not be up for subjective judgment rather analyzed by machines, again to ensure quality and to have unbiased opinions on the quality.
Here at Hello, we have been trying the FlexPMD for hudson/ teamcity to render some form of quality output when the CI process is run. This gives us measurables for the current state of the code at every build (triggered in our case by SVN commits), and reduces the code-review to looking at a list of issues detected by the FlexPMD.
Now FlexPMD has been released as an eclipse plugin. This is GREAT news! It means, that every developer can get feedback on every build about the state of the code he is currently working on. The impact is IMHO much greater than having the feedback posted on a results site for a given CI server, as it tends to be corrected faster when the feedback is provided in context to what you are doing. Even more important is to have this kind of feedback available to you very early in the development process, so that errors done at the early state doesn’t multiply in the system during development.
So without further ado: The plugin can be downloaded from adobe here.