If you use Sonar already, I am sure that you know already the worse of all 7 developer’s deadly sins:

And if you don’t, I would assume you know about duplicated / cloned / similar code when you talk about quality of code and that you have heard of tools such PMD CPD or Simian.

But why does copy paste matters from a code quality point of view? How can you benefit from Sonar to improve this? Let’s try to figure this out.

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There is often some misunderstanding when people talk about coding rules engines. Everyone tries to take position in favor of his preferred tool and does his best to explain what are the weaknesses of the other ones. For instance, a PMD supporter could say :

“Checkstyle is a stupid tool consuming time to search for tab characters when PMD is a smart one that can do the job alone as a good soldier, Findbugs is very good for resource consumption and Macker is … uh, what is Macker ? “

Time to breathe ! There is in fact no need to take such position since those tools are not competing but are complementary and should be used simultaneously as it is the case in Sonar. Each of them is mainly targeting a certain type of coding rules : conventions (Checkstyle), bad practices (PMD) and potential bugs (FindBugs).

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