Recently, during a project rescue effort, I introduced Checkstyle as part of the automated build. This morning I saw the build failing because of the following Checkstyle violation:

When I checked the source code of the 2 files, this is what I found:

1
2

public class SuccessEvent extends EngineEvent {
    private final Document document;

1
2
3

    public SuccessEvent(final Document document) {
        this.document = document;
    }

1
2
3
4

    @Override
    Document getDocument() {
        return document;
    }

1
2
3
4
5

    @Override
    String getMessage() {
        return "";
    }
}

1
2

public class AcceptEvent extends EngineEvent {
    private final Document document;

1
2
3

    public AcceptEvent(final Document document) {
        this.document = document;
    }

1
2
3
4

    @Override
    Document getDocument() {
        return document;
    }

1
2
3
4
5

    @Override
    String getMessage() {
        return "";
    }
}

As you can see, except the name of the class, the 2 files are identical. On one hand I’m thrilled that Checkstyle does a great job at catching such errors, on other hand I’m sad that there are developers who write such sloppy code.

Related posts:

1. Art of amazing object programming!
2. Project Rescue Report
3. Self Documenting Code Example
4. More Fluent Interfaces in Test
5. Three common ways of reusing behavior/code in OO

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 11:52 AM and is filed under Agile, Coaching, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.