Day 31. Technical debt

#android #100daysofcode #kotlin #mobile

Code quality is a cornerstone of programming. Rapid development without attention to quality is a direct path to increased technical debt. This makes our lives more complicated in the future. However, my projects often don't reach this future because they die early.

What I did:

Today, I focused on code quality. I decided to set up the static analysis to prevent the rise of technical debt. I chose a standard solution for Kotlin projects: Detekt. I won't go into detail about Detekt; you can read more about it in my series of posts. I've used it for Android projects, but not for KMM. I spent some time to clearly understand how to set it up for our project. After several attempts, I got it working. As I expected, the first run of Detekt revealed a lot of issues in my code - more than two hundred. I don't have time to fix them all. I used a hack to hide them like dust under the carpet. I just run the detketBaseline task, which generate a baseline file that suppresses all current issues. It feels like starting with a clean slate.

This was the first step. I added some automation with a GitHub action to make Detekt more efficient. Now, when I created a Pull Request or push directly to the develop branch, a GitHub action with code quality checks is triggered. To save time on running checks, I added a pre-commit hook that does the same before committing. You can read more about this hack in another post.