Voxxed Days Vienna 2017

The technical debt metaphor is gaining significant traction in the agile development community as a way to understand and communicate those issues related to accepting bad programming practices in order to achieve fast results (e.g a deadline). However, the idea of getting fast results becomes an illusion, since the cost of building software increases over the time.

Currently, technical debt is usually controlled by means of static code analysis tools, such as PMD or CheckStyle, which report a list of coding style issues for the whole project. Moreover, little by little, some tools are appearing to provide quick fixes for some of these reported issues. Unfortunately, these tools do not have an incremental mode to detect or fix our bad programming practices for an specific new commit. Currently, this incremental checking and fixing capabilities has gained special interest in the context of continuous delivery, where every single contribution needs to be analyzed and validated before merging it to master or deploying it to production.

In this session, we will show how to control the technical debt with Fabric8 and Jenkins by defining, checking and fixing pipelines for static code analysis tools automatically.