What Every Development Shop cannot do without!

For those of you who have not heard of hudson, where have you been. It is the new kid on the block in the Continuous Integration space, and it (IMO) stands head and shoulders above the competition.

It has added an incalculable amount of value to our development environment, enough that we depend on it as much as we depend on our IDE. Furthermore, it has single handedly raised the quality of the code such that I am so disappointed we did not have it in since the beginning of our project.

Why do I say all of that?

To my mind, the killer feature that hudson has is that it supports plugins. This is a feature what sets it apart.

And the killer plugin, which has contributed to the code quality is a fairly simple plugin which allows the results of various code quality metrics to be summarised and tracked in hudson.

We now have continuous metrics for the following...

• Checkstyle - this is a tool which examines source code against a number of rules. It checks for instance, the formatting is correct, cyclomatic complexity and npath as well as simple class/method lenghts. It flags as a warning if the rule goes outside of the allowable scope.
• FindBugs - this is a class level code checking tool. It can find things like equals being executed against different types
• Cpd (Copy-Paste) - a cool plugin that checks for where code is the same and thus probably was copied and pasted.
• Pmd - another class level checker

Now I could have run these code checking tools without hudson. Hudson however, allows me to track changes over time and to know when new violations have been added etc. And the running of these tools has already avoided many potential bugs.

So if you haven't checked out Hudson and its Plugins, it's never too late. The longer you leave it the worse your code is going to get.

If you want to know more, then let me know.