Being a Code Custodian

The roles of a team lead can vary dramatically depending on the team dynamics. Being a code custodian may or may not be appropriate for your organization. I have found it valuable in some situations. There are automated and manual approaches to monitoring the integrity of software. I like to apply both when appropriate. Each has pros and cons:

• Automated Approach - Usage of software tools to detect potential defects and/or style violations
• Advantages
• Can check for a large number of potential defects and/or design smells
• No ongoing time investment after initial investment to setup and configure
• Can be tied into CI environments like Jenkins to guarantee adherance
• Disadvantages
• Not good at catching the most important issues
• If rules are configured too restrictively, becomes more of a hindrance than a benefit
• Manual Approach - Human review of checkins or some subset of checkins
• Advantages
• Only way to catch many types of issues
• Keeps the reviewer abreast of new development
• Leads to mentoring opportunities for the reviewer
• Good way for the reviewer to learn from other approaches and pickup new techniques
• Disadvantages
• Difficult and important to be completely objective and remove opinion from feedback
• If applied heavy-handedly 
• Kills developer empowerment
• Can be disastrous to morale
• Time-intensive
• Spotty
• Usually unrealistic to fully check everything

I would further decompose automated approaches into 2 categories.

• Category 1: Surface Analysis - Static-analysis tools including lint, checkstyle, and findbugs
• Advantages
• Customizable
• Rules-based
• File-driven
• Easily integrated into many modern IDE's
• Easily integrated into build or CI environments via a CLI
• Many free or open-source
• Often mature and robust
• Disadvantage
• While they can catch many "surface" issues, they don't always dig very deeply
• Category 2: Deep Analysis - Tools that looks more deeply into aspects such as cyclomatic complexity, memory usage, and performance. 
• Advantage
• Tend to be higher value 
• Disadvantages
• Difficult to automate
• Some intended more as an aid for manual test and debug
• Some produce results that should be inspected and interpreted
• Can be difficult or impossible to quantify rules for
• Less typically free or open-source

In the next two posts I will delve into how I applied these tools in recent projects.