PMD - Is there a way to track PMD complaints from an individual developer

Question

Is there a tool or plugin for tracking PMD, CheckStyle and Findbugs non-compliance reports for each developer.

Thanks KR

Answer 1

Sonar seems to be what you need

Sonar is an open source quality management platform dedicated to continuously analyze and measure technical quality

it has various additional plugins , but by default it has everything you need - checkstyle, pmd, findbugs. All you need to do is just download, unzip it somewhere, run the sonar. For your project, you need minimal pom.xml (sonar uses it to know where the compiled files are), and you execute the pom command with the command (like me):

mvn clear sonar: sonar

Learn more about the documentation on the sonar project page.

There is also a way to integrate Sonar with Eclipse (but you need to have Sonar, Eclipse just connects to it and receives reports, anyway, it’s easy to use because you open the class and see the sonar notes associated with it, so you can fix them)

Here are the sonar reports in action, you can try and decide;)

Answer 2

I do not know such a tool, but I think it would be technically possible to write it, given the time.

Hypothetically, such a tool should work by checking each revision from version control, running PMD / CheckStyle / FindBugs on each revision, and then attribute the “delta” in the violation messages to the person who checked in the editorial office.

However, I suspect that using such a tool as it may have serious flaws.

Firstly, such a tool does not actually improve the quality of the code or even quantifies your problems with the quality of the code better than you can already do. All he does is point fingers at the individual team members.

And it is entirely possible that the finger pointer is unfair. For example, it is a fact that PMD and FindBugs often point out things like violations when they are clearly harmless, or the issue of significant discussions. When someone from your team who is “silent” for introducing such violations, they will be rightly upset.

If you are not careful, the result will be a loss of team morale, and team members who focus on violations, instead of working to advance the project.

Similarly, you should not use reports from such a tool to find out who your best / worst developers are. You will probably get the wrong answer.

Answer 3

If you use a version control system, you can use the guilt / praise function, which will show you in turn the last time you touched it. If you use a good IDE, it should be able to annotate your gutter / margin with information.