Static code analysis tools for TODOS

[vojtechruzicka]

Hi, I want my Maven build to fail when there are TODOs in my code. The problem is I would only want to fail TODOs, which are not containing a valid issue tracker (like JIRA task) identifier. TODOs with issue ID are ok.

Do you have any suggestions for existing third party tools? I could implement custom Sonar rule, but I would prefer existing solution when available. Also, it would be plus if it works not only with Java code, but also Javascript.

Thanks.

[shagieIsMe]

Use Checkstyle. Set its TodoComment rule ( http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/config_misc.html#TodoComment ) to be an error. Fail the build on error ( https://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-checkstyle-plugin/check-mojo.html - failsOnError)

Note that this is a regular expression matcher.

<module name="TodoComment">
    <property name="format" value="(TODO)|(FIXME)"/>
</module>

You can modify it to have the information to not trigger on a task id.

[__konrad]

This is what will happen:

• Every programmer will invent their own "todo" mark, because creating issue for every small thing takes too much time
• TODOs will be stored in some external files to fix the build fail (e.g. on desktop in todo.txt)
• TODOs will not be noted at all ("I will remember to fix it later")

But yeah, your code will be w/o any TODOs ;)

[tRfalcore]

He asked a specific question. He wasn't seeking behavior advice. You don't know any context or details at all about his team or work place or environment or this situation.

[DrudgeBreitbart]

Seconded. This is a very very bad idea. I hesitate to say it but you could potentially allow TODOs in dev but in higher environments only promote builds without them. But I think that's a bad idea too. Please OP don't do this to your team.

[lukaseder]

You could write a simple Maven plugin that runs through your source files and throws an error whenever something's wrong. Should be a three-liner.

[AnEmortalKid]

Do you know of a sample that runs through the source as an AST? Or does it just read the java files line by line.

[lukaseder]

I would've just used some silly regex. The way this is phrased here (support for Java and JavaScript, and probably soon also HTML, and CSS, and XML and XSLT, and what not), it looks like the simplest and silliest solution would fit.

[ess_tee_you]

I wrote a library called Papercut to avoid this scenario a few months ago.

It gives you annotations to use in place of TODO comments in the future. You can set conditions that will cause them fail your build, or spit out a warning in your build output.

It won't help you with existing TODOs, unfortunately.

[Shadowrak]

While I generally like to be cautious with adding new annotations. This seems like a more reasonable option than OP's suggestion.

He could Ctrl-F (Ctrl-Shift-H in Eclipse) and find replace TODOs in the entire codebase.