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Improving Code Quality for Java

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Kulbhushan Singhal Follow
Mar 8 · 5 min read

We’ve all seen the above image being mentioned in the context of code
quality. But what do we mean when we say that a particular piece of code
is good or bad?

What is Code Quality & Why it matters?

Great authors are known for writing books that tell a clear, compelling
story. They use tools like chapters, headings, and paragraphs to clearly
organize their thoughts and painlessly guide their reader. A developer’s
job is similar to that of an author, we simply use different jargon of
namespaces, classes, and methods. If authors don’t use their tools
effectively, then their work will be difficult for the readers to read and
understand whether it is a book or code.

Coming back to the topic of code quality, it is a set of desirable

characteristics that any piece of code should possess.

Reliability: Should work consistently without frequent crashes.

Consistent Code Style: Should follow consistent code style and

naming conventions applicable to the language

Maintainable: Should be easy to understand. Maintainable code is

easy to extend and add new functionality.

Well-tested: Code that has well-written tests tends to have fewer

bugs

Efficient: Should not use unnecessary resources to perform the

desired operations

Secure: Should prevent coding vulnerabilities like SQL injection

Lower Technical Debt: Having low technical debt allows teams to

move fast and develop new functionality without being slowed down
by low quality and non-maintainable code

The more of the above qualities that a code possesses, higher will be the
quality of the code. Based on Project/Client requirements some of the
above characteristics might not be required for the code.

It is extremely challenging to write high quality code when working

under delivery deadlines, but it matters if you’re thinking about the long
term maintainability of the code. Also, high quality code will help the
teams to maintain consistent delivery speed in the long term.

Based on my experience, below are a few things that have been highly
effective in improving and maintaining high-quality code in my projects.

. . .

Improving Code Quality using Static Code Analyzers

Compilers can catch and prevent syntactic issues, but they cannot detect
issues like

Inconsistent code structure

Things that the community might have identified based on experience

Code complexity

Static code analysis is a technique of examining the code before it is run.

There are tools that can do static analysis and they work by analyzing the
code against multiple coding rules. If some violations are found, these
tools can be integrated into the build tools like gradle, maven, etc to fail
the build.

Below are some tools that can be integrated into your projects with very
little efforts:

Checkstyle
Checkstyle is a static code analysis tool used in software development for
checking if Java source code complies with coding rules. The checks
performed by Checkstyle are mainly limited to the presentation of the
code. These checks do not confirm the correctness or completeness of
the code.

Using Checkstyle will ensure that a consistent coding style is followed by

the team developing the code making it easier to read and understand.

Below are some of the checks that can be performed using checkstyle:

Naming conventions of attributes and methods

The number of function parameters

Line lengths

The presence of mandatory headers like copyrights

The use of imports, and scope modifiers

The spaces between some characters

The practices of class construction

Multiple code complexity measurements

PMD
PMD (Programming Mistake Detector) is a static code analyzer that
reports on issues found within the application code.

PMD can help detect issues in the code that could cause issues when the
code is shipped to production.

Possible bugs — Empty try/catch/finally/switch blocks/eating original

exception and throwing a new one

Dead code — Unused local variables, parameters, and private

methods

Empty if/while statements

Overcomplicated expressions — Unnecessary if statements, for loops

that could be while loops

Suboptimal code — Wasteful String/StringBuffer usage

Classes with high Cyclomatic Complexity measurements

Incorrect BigDecimal Usage

CPD (Copy/Paste Detector)

CPD, as the name suggests, is a copy based detector that is extremely
efficient even for large codebases. It is written using Karp-Rabin string
matching algorithm.

It can be configured to detect duplication greater than a determined

number of tokens. Copy/Pasted code is undesirable as it makes the code
difficult to maintain and could lead to bugs in scenarios where some
change is made to one of the places and forgotten to be propagated at
other places.

. . .

Measuring Code Quality

Disclaimer: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
measure

Code Coverage Metrics

Code Coverage is a metric that can be used to get some confidence about
the code. Having said that, be careful in choosing which tests are used to
measure the same. Not all tests from the test pyramid are the same.Tools
like JaCoCo can be used to figure out the code coverage.

Only unit tests should be considered when looking at the code coverage
metrics as unit tests are about testing whether the code does what the
developer intended it to do and those are the ones that are the fastest
ones in execution and deliver higher value.

There might be value in measuring the code coverage of integration

tests, but it should be considered as separate artifact and the reports
should not be combined with the unit test reports. Remember integration
tests are about making sure that all the components work together.
Using integration tests for increasing code coverage is like using a
sledge-hammer to crack open a nut.

Toxicity Chart

Toxicity Chart for some version of Hibernate. Source

Toxicity Chart as the name suggests is a way of figuring out the toxicity of
the code. This chart represents the toxicity of each class in the codebase
based on a toxicity score that is calculated based on a set of parameters
like file length, method length, cyclomatic complexity, nested statements
and many more. This chart can be shown to non-technical people like
business people, managers to help them understand the quality of code.

. . .

Reference Code
The Github repository at the link below contains a sample project with all
of the above-mentioned tools setup. It is structured as easy to pick and
choose which tools you require to integrate into your projects.

https://github.com/singhalkul/java-quality-checks

. . .

Maintaining code quality is a continuous process and cannot be done by

a single person on the team. It is the responsibility of entire team to make
sure that the code which is written is of high quality.

While the tools mentioned above will help make sure that some of the
code quality aspects are present in the code, it is not the only way.
Following extreme programming practices like pair programming, test-
driven development, code reviews, continuous integration should be
followed by teams to make sure that all the characteristics of high quality
code are present in the codebase.

Quality Java Sonar Sonarqube Gradle

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WRIT T EN BY

Kulbhushan Singhal Follow

Developer, Machine Learning Novice

inspiringbrilliance Follow

Writings from Sahaj Software focusing on complex problems

without complicating the solutions.

See responses (2)

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