Tizra Blog

Leading a team of developers in the effort of building a robust, quality software product should involve the establishment of some process and tools to assist the team effort and serve as a safety net for the errors of getting people to work together. Continuous integration is, I believe, a crucial element of that process. Introduced by Martin Fowler and Matt Foemmel (see article Continuous Integration ), continuous integration establishes the practice of frequent integration of work developed by the several team members verified by automated build and testing of integrated code within a clean sandbox. This practice is valuable for several reasons: It promotes the development of a clear process of building/deployment independent of any specificity of developer's platforms. Code that exists on a single platform only is bound to become dependent on specific aspects of that platform without anyone really noticing the dependencies until trying to port to other platforms. The existence ...

How many times have you, in your developer life, smacked our head and screamed "that was sooo obvious!" upon discovering a bug ? And how many times those were pretty simple bugs that could have been caught just by looking closely at the code and finding a silly mistake ? I'm guessing too many times.... :-) PMD , no real meaning to the acronym (see here ), is a pretty handy tool that if used with some frequency can help you at least save your head from the smacking. PMD is a Java code analysis tool that draws from an experience-driven rule set to look into your code and flag possible mistakes. From unused imports to the always error prone braceless if statement, PMD can give you a pretty good coverage of what you can do to improve your code and reduce the probability of making a silly mistake. PMD can be run from within your ant or maven build file should you want to make running it part of your build process. You can find plugins for most of the popular IDEs to make it ...