I created a library that measures amount of WTFs per package or project. This library is a by-product that derived from what I was doing few days ago:

I was dabbling with Java and decided to take a break. I came across a well know image that depicts code review session behind closed doors. The image called “The only valid measurement of code quality: WTF/minute”. I decided to make an extension to the latter concept.

This library brings you the ability to mark code smells in your source code (Classes, methods, fields etc.) with ‘WTF’ annotation. The WTF annotation accepts an arbitary message, if none provided, the default message ‘Dude.. WTF?!’ is used instead. When source compiles, the compiler generates a warning using the message from the detected annotation(s) and information about annotated element. The following is a sample output from compiling a class containing WTF annotations:

Warning: : In CLASS [wtf.per.project.model.DummyPojoImpl] :CLASS level => WTF?! Are you for real?! This naming convention is bad!
Warning: : In CLASS [wtf.per.project.model.DummyPojoImpl] : FIELD ‘SOME_CONSTANT’ => WTF?! What is this non-descriptive name?
Warning: : In CLASS [wtf.per.project.model.DummyPojoImpl] : CONSTRUCTOR ‘DummyPojoImpl(java.lang.String)’ => WTF?! Dude.. WTF?!

The library also provides a custom JUnit test runner class. The runner consumes package name, annotation class and search filter through @Grep annotation (used in conjunction with @RunWith). The runner scans .class files under the given package, its sub-packages and JARs for the given annotation (for example WTF.class) occurrences. If String regex pattern provided in @Grep, classes are filtered out from being scanned based on the filter. The runner uses a test class internally to assert whether the code is still infested with WTFs (or any other annotation class set in @Grep).

The analysis of .class files within given package, its sub-packages and any JAR files found is done using reflection. At first I was using third party library called ‘Reflections’ for this task (which is a very good tool btw!), but I ended up not using it anymore. I did not want to have third party dependencies and implemented my own meta data analysis in order to keep the library size small and lean. In the near future, I will extract the metadata analysis logic into a separate library. It should be quite flexible since there different .class file scanners in place. For example, scanner for constructors only or for method parameters, fields only etc.

So, if runner’s test assertion fails (given annotation like @WTF found present in the code), the test class generates metrics about how many WTFs are there and where. These metrics appended to the assertion failure message. For example, the following is the example of the custom JUnit runner:

@RunWith(WTFsPerProject.class)
@Grep(packageName = "wtf.per.project.model",
classNameFilter = ".*", annotationClass = WTF.class)
public final class WTFsPerProjectRunner { }

I have few POJOs marked with WTF annoation, the following is the produced output after running the above runner:

Another example of the custom JUnit runner:

@RunWith(WTFsPerProject.class)
//Grep only inner classes
@Grep(packageName = "wtf.per.project.model",
classNameFilter = ".*[$].*", annotationClass = WTF.class)
public final class WTFsPerProjectRunner { }

Disclaimer

I created this library for fun. Nothing more. If someone actually decides to use it – great.

If you want you can fork it on Github

Please report if you experience any problems