Rocket Surgery

Those of you who know me or who have read my earlier posts know that I am a static code analysis fan, and some of my favorite tools are PMD, Checkstyle, FindBugs, and JDepend, for their excellent feedback on the state of the quality of your code. In fact, I regularly use all of them and usually in combination with other tools (such as JUnit, Emma, etc) to gather code metrics.

The reports from each of these tools naturally identify problems — why else would you run them? And once you see a problem, you naturally want to run right out and fix them. The report shows them all, rated by severity, with counts and everything, and you can see the types of errors. It’s just a simple refactoring, right?

Better think twice before activating that refactoring in your IDE.

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In a previous job, I had a trainer for a CASE tool who gave me a phrase that has stuck with me for the past 15 years: “A fool with a tool is just a faster fool.” The truth of this is obvious on the surface, of course, but many times we developers don’t see it happening to us as it happens - the onset is too gradual. I am beginning to see an emergent anti-pattern, particularly among my less experienced colleagues, which has cropped up as a result of Eclipse usage - something I call “Squiggly-Driven Development”.

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While preparing a training class this past month on Effective Exception Handling for a client, I came up with a list of “Ten Commandments of Exception Handling.” Some of them were the basic, standard items (”Thou shalt not catch or throw java.lang.Throwable”, “Thou shalt not throw raw java.lang.RuntimeExceptions–thou shalt throw a subclass instead”, “Thou shalt not catch an Exception unless thou art going to truly handle it, or are going to wrap it in another Exception”). Other items on the list were specifically tailored for the client. I liked one of the “commandments” better than the others, however:

“XIII: Thou shalt not catch any Exceptions in JUnit tests, unless testing that your code under test throws the Exceptions the API says it does.”

If you read this and say, “well, duh, Matt!” then you and I are thinking alike and I am preaching to the choir. If this statement has even a whiff of controversy to it, however, read on.

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