Improve the quality of your J2EE-based projects

Effective tools, gates, and accountability can help ensure your system's success

By Jimmy Jarrett, JavaWorld.com, 01/10/05

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Many people incorrectly judge Java/J2EE-based systems on problems associated with maintaining the codebase, the number of bugs or inconsistencies in functionality, or poor performance. Fortunately, these problems have less to do with the Java/J2EE technology itself and more to do with the lack of a process focused on the quality of the system. To ensure success of large-scale Java/J2EE projects developed by a sizeable team, or across multiple teams, a team lead must:

Use tools that can measure quality
Define a set of gates and artifacts derived from the tools
Stress accountability to deliver, monitor, and enforce the results

This article explains how incorporating these three tactics into your development strategy can ensure that your team consistently produces quality projects.

Importance of tools

Have you ever heard of a construction company attempting to build a house without a power saw, electric drill, or a tool as fundamental as a hammer? True, a house could be built without today's new-fangled equipment, however, construction would take much longer, and the same level of quality would prove nearly impossible to achieve. You could build a hut with your bare hands, but you could build a mansion with the right tools.

Today's developers are no different than a person attempting to build a house. The tools are essential to the developer, both for increasing productivity and for enhancing quality. The tools developers use must enable them to produce the highest quality code possible in the shortest amount of time, which means that today's IDE is no longer simply a tool used to write, debug, and compile code. Instead, an IDE must help developers identify whether they are following proper coding conventions and known design patterns, if they are in compliance with industry standards such as Web services, if their code adheres to its contract, and if it performs per the requirements. In addition, when developers are not given the environments necessary to achieve continuous builds and automated testing, an IDE's capabilities become even more important to ensuring the system's quality.

Enter the Eclipse IDE, which provides built-in capabilities that, when used with several plug-ins, can aid in increasing the quality of both the codebase and the system. Eclipse is an open, extensible IDE built for anything and nothing in particular. Eclipse’s Java development environment is open source, free, and fully customizable. Eclipse both enables and promotes the addition of new capabilities via open source and commercially available custom-built plug-ins. By utilizing Eclipse, along with a key set of plug-ins illustrated in the Eclipse plug-in matrix shown in Figure 1, it is possible for a developer, and a team, to measure the quality of any J2EE- or Java-based system.

Figure 1. Eclipse plug-in matrix

Controlling the quality of a system is impossible if you cannot measure and monitor it. It is important to understand key areas in a system that warrant measurement. These areas include a system's maintainability, reliability, and performance. While this list is obviously not all-inclusive, these three items are highly suited as the basic building blocks for ensuring the quality of a system.