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Comment by Ntrails | Hacker News Reader

I remember a project to get us down from like 1500 build warnings to sub 100. It took a long time, generated plenty of bikeshedding, and was impossible to demonstrate value.

I, personally, was mostly just pissed we didn't get it to zero. Unsurprisingly the number has climbed back up since

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Could you propose to fail the build based on the number of warnings to ensure it doesn't go up?

I did something similar with spotbugs. There were existing warnings I couldn't get time to fix so I configured the maven to fail if it exceed the level at which I enabled it.

This has the unfortunate side effect that if it drops and no one adjusts the threshold then people can add more issues without failing the build.

If you can instead construct a list of existing instances to grandfather in, that doesn't suffer from this problem. Of course many linting tools do this via "ignore" code comments.

That feels less arbitrary than a magic number (because it is!) and I've seen it work.

We used this approach to great effect when we migrated a huge legacy project from Javascript to Typescript. It gives you enough flexibility in the in between stages so you're not forced to change weird code you don't know right away, while enforcing enough of a structure to eventually make it out alive in the end.

> This has the unfortunate side effect that if it drops and no one adjusts the threshold then people can add more issues without failing the build.

Our tests are often written with a list of known exceptions. However, such tests also fail if an exception is no longer needed - with a congratulatory message and a notice that this exception should be removed from the list. This ensures that the list gets shorter and shorter.

Absolutely could!

However, management felt kinda burned because that was a bunch of time and unsurprisingly nobody was measurably more productive afterwards (it turns out those are just shitty code tidbits, but not highly correlated with areas which where it is miserable to make changes. Some of the over-refactorings probably made things harder.

It was a lovely measurable metric, making it an easy sell in advance. Which maybe was the problem idk.

I did this with a project that was worked on by a large team (50+ devs, many, many, many kloc) when we first added linting to the project (this was very early 2000s) - we automatically tracked the number of errors and warnings at each build, persisted them, and then failed the build if the numbers went up. So it automatically adjusted the threshold.

It worked really well to incrementally improve things without forcing people to deal with them all the time. People would from time to time make sure they cleaned up a number of issues in the files they happened to be working on, but they didn't have to do them all (which can be a problem with strategies that for example lint only the changed files, but require 0 errors). We threw a small line chart up one one of our dashboards to provide some sense of overall progress. I think we got it down to zero or thereabouts within a year or so.

It depends on the language. It's so easy to generate warnings in C/C++, other languages they are rare or it's easy to avoid them.

I guess I've been lucky to work on companies in the past ten or so years, where compiler warnings were treated as errors in the CI. Also been really lucky to use an editor which always highlights warnings and lists them, so I can fix those easily.

Step 1: get it to zero

Step 2: -Werror

Step 3: there is no step 3

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