Scott Dutton

Lead developer at Sykes Cottages, enjoy contributing to both Open Source projects (joindin, backbone forms, phpbb, phpunit, etc.) and Stackoverflow (12k+ rep)

When I’m not coding I’m either doing something with my Springerdoodle or playing/coaching ice hockey.

Moving Towards Better Coding Standards

Code standards develop over time, and old code bases often suffer with older standards as there is no easy way to migrate towards the new standards leaving them in an all or nothing state. The tools available (phpcs, phpmd phpunit, phpmnd etc) all work on the whole code base and while some offer auto fixers for the code, larger (and older) code bases have too many issues which can not be auto fixed.

Coverage Checker allows these tools to work alongside the tools mentioned above to ensure that all new code checked in conforms to these standards optionally also allowing a percentage of new code which must conform in order to ease the transition for example 80% of the new code must be covered by tests.

New tools such as phan and phpstan are also very noisy which means you need to have a high level of quality before starting to use them, This tool allows an easy way to start benefiting from these tools! This is really easy to set up and all code bases can benefit.

This also works for tools in other languages such as pylint, jacoco and more