Can solving lint bugs be interesting?

Today I am going to present you how we’ve changed monotonous solving bugs into motivating process.

PEP

Most developers need to improve their code quality. To do  that they can use style guide for e.g for Python code (PEP). PEP contains an index of all Python Enhancement Proposals.

Below you can find which logs PEP returned in a command line.

Do you think that this logs’ presentation is  good enough to interest a developer? Will he solve these  thousands of bugs?

Undoubtedly, there are much information about errors and warnings so PEP returns long logs. But developer can not even know how to start solving bugs. And even if she/he finally starts, after each commit he/she needs to run that script again to check if quantity of bugs are increased or decreased. It seems to be endless, exhausting and very monotonous.  Nobody is encouraged to do it.

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Quality monitoring

Open Event team wants to increase our productivity and code quality. Therefore we use a tool which allow us to check code style, security, duplication complexity and test coverage on every commit. That tool is Codacy and it fulfils our requirements in 100%. It is very helpful because it adds comments to pull requests and enables developer quickly find where a bug is located. It’s very comfortable, because you don’t need to check issues in above awful logs results. Take a look how it looks in Codacy.

-DO NOT MERGE  Ticketing Flow by niranjan94 · Pull Request  1927 · fossasia open event orga server.png

Isn’t it clear? Of course that it’s. Codacy shows in which line issue ocurres and which type of issue it’s.

Awesome statistics dashboard

I’d like to give an answer how you can engage your team to solve issues and make this process more interesting. On the main page codacy tool welcomes you with great statistics about your project.

open event orga server   Codacy   Dashboard

You can see number of issues, category like code complexity, code style, compatibility, documentation, error prone, performance, security and unused code. That params show in which stage of code quality your project is. I think that every developer’s aim is to have the highest code quality and increasing these statistics. But if project has many issues, developer sees only a few changes in project charts.

Define Goals

Recently I’ve discovered how you can motivate yourself more. You can define a goal which you’d like achive. It can be goal of category or goal of file. For example Open Event team has defined goal for a specific file to achieve. If you define small separate goals, you can quicker see the results of your work.

open event orga server_2   Codacy   Goals

On the left sidebar you can find a item which is named “Goals”. In this area you can easily add your projects goals. Everything is user friendly so you shouldn’t have a problem  to create own goals.