We configured Code Climate to be aware of all open issues instead of
ignoring open issues via the rubocop todo lists. We were hoping that
Code Climate could give us some nice stats like progress if it's aware
of all our open issues. But the graphs don't tell us anything. So it's
better to have one source of truth for our open style issues and that is
our rubocop config in this repository. It contains two todo lists that
document all violations we would like to fix in the future but it's okay
to submit pull requests that don't fix those.
Instead of accepting new style issues in Code Climate, every pull
request with new violations has to add them to the rubocop config. I
hope that this will make rubocop more useful and encourage developers to
reduce code style debt.
Our rubocop config hides all current violations. It allows us to have a
passing rubocop run on the current code and improve it gradually. It
detects new violations, but doesn't annoy us with all the existing ones.
Code Climate has its own way of remembering all current violations which
is more sophisticated than ours. The new config for Code Climate doesn't
hide any violations so that Code Climate can give us a realistic score
of code quality and warn us about every new violation.
Splitting the configuration into the main three parts gives a quicker
overview and makes maintaining the parts easier.
One of the biggest pros of linters like Rubocop is to get valuable feedback to
help write better code. The way we have Rubocop configured now we don't prevent
new code from adhere improved code quality and this is specially important when
touching code that already suffers from complexity.
Without all Rubocop's Metrics cops enabled there's no way to get this insights
and write better code. This enables them while regenerating the
`.rubocop_todo.yml` to hide the current violations.
So, next time we touch existing code that we think could be simpler, we should
go to `.rubocop_todo.yml` and remove any occurrences of the file in question.
This way we could Rubocop's feedback right in the editor. This is tremendously
helpful when refactoring. It shows you where to start.
There's no point of using Code Climate if most of its checks are
disabled. Now it scores our codebase with an A and reports just 2 code
smells, 64 duplications and 14 other issues. That couldn't farther from
reality. If we care about the architecture and maintainability of our
app, this is a must.
To transition towards enabling all default checks, I started with
scss-lint, duplication and method-complexity. This doesn't mean will
have to fix them all straight away as we'll add the current violations
to the `.rubocop_todo.yml` but it'll point us the parts where we should
focus our efforts.
