Miscellaneous

Lint Testing

Lint testing refers to looking for suspicious or unusual coding patterns which could be an indication of buggy or hard to maintain code.

Style checking refers to ensuring that the general coding style, for example the use of indentation, is consistent and follows generally accepted conventions.

Since Origen applications are typically developed and maintained by multiple engineers it is important to establish common coding practices so that code can be easily read and reasoned about by anyone involved in the project.

The Origen lint test uses a 3rd party tool to enforce the Ruby community maintained style guide. Best of all this tool can automatically correct many of the common style violations, including the (very common) inconsistent use of indentation.

By taking this approach individual preferences are taken out of the equation and adherence to the standards are no longer reliant on individuals remembering to use spaces instead of tabs (for example).

Invoke the lint tests via the following command, by default this will run on the application’s lib directory:

origen lint

To run on individual files, or other directories:

origen lint pattern config/application.rb

To automatically correct violations where possible:

origen lint -c

By default the tests will be fairly strict and will enforce most of the requirements of the Ruby style guide.

However many of the checks will involve some manual modification of the code to resolve them and for legacy applications with large code bases this is probably not worth the effort. In that case an easier set of tests can be run instead:

origen lint -e

The easier set will mainly limit the tests to those which can be corrected automatically, which still covers the most annoying issues such as inconsistent indentation and general code formatting problems.

However all new applications should use the strict tests and Origen core has already been made clean to the strict checks.

An application configuration option can be added to specify the default options that should be applied when the origen lint command is run without any arguments.

Here is the default value that will be present in all new Origen applications:

# config/application.rb

config.lint_test = {
  # Require the lint tests to pass before allowing a release to proceed
  run_on_tag: true,
  # Auto correct violations where possible whenever 'origen lint' is run
  auto_correct: true, 
  # Limit the testing for large legacy applications
  #level: :easy,
  # Run on these directories/files by default
  #files: ["lib", "config/application.rb"],
}

The lint test will be run automatically when a user tries to tag/release the application whenever the Origen.config.lint_test[:run_on_tag] attribute is set to true as shown above.

In such a case the user will not be allowed to release until the issues are resolved and this should be the approach taken by all new applications.