Sniffing refactoring needs
by kasi77 & 2 other(s)While still messing around with the PHP_CodeSniffer Pear package, I took a somehow jealous 1000 feet look at some prominent code inspection tools of the Java community: PMD and Checkstyle. Browsing their available rule sets/checks I soon recognized that guaranteeing the coding standard adherence is just a partial aspect of these tools. The following post will focus on one of these additional aspects, which is finding problems related to the code size of the inspected code artifacts, by showing how to port two selected rules to sniffs for utilization with the PHP_CodeSniffer tool. These ported sniffs can be used to automatically spot obvious code smells in the code base and to signal the need to apply the appropriate and odour reducing activity known as refactoring. Further more a complete set of code size sniffs, going beyond the trageted realm of the sniffs to come, could be used to speed up the feedback loop and to reduce the effort for manual code reviews.
