Cleaning up a large, legacy Java project

Question

I\'ve been assigned to do some work on a huge Java project, and the influence of several iterations of developers is obvious. There is no standard coding style, formatting, nam

Answer 1

I had such experience. I agree with people that recommend maven build, eclipse, Checkstyle, refactoring of big classes etc. I understand that you cannot achieve full test coverage before your are starting to work. I'd recommend 1. reformat code in batch mode using checkstyle or similar tool 2. enable all reasonable warnings in Eclipse and refactor code that cause such warnings if this refactoring is trivial. In other cases put @SupressWarning and special TODO to come back to this code later. 3. use defect driven automatic testing, i.e. develop tests for module you are going to change.

Good luck!