Quality Assurance Tool to Improve the FiringDock

After the first robot tournament in class, I decided to improve the performance of FiringDock as it is not an effecient strategy to only move when get hit by a bullet. The new FiringDock moves randomly after each time the enemy is in the radar to avoid the bullet. Also, when hitting on another robot it turns the gun toward that robot and fires hard. While the FiringDock 1.0 couldn't defeat the SpinBot and the Walls at all, the FiringDock 1.1 has more chance to defeat those two robots. As a result in the 10-round battlefield, the FiringDock 1.1 can survive for 6-8 rounds with the Walls and 4-6 rounds with the SpinBot. The result of the battlefield with Crazy is also significant improve.

After making all of these changes for the FiringDock, I used the Ant, which is an open-source build tool, to automate the process of style checking, executing test case, and building a distribution package. After installing Ant along with Ivy, I used checkstyle, PMD, and findbugs to check my FirindDock's code. As a result, there are 10 checkstyle errors

Missing package-info.java file. 0
Missing a Javadoc comment. 25
Missing a Javadoc comment. 44
Line is longer than 100 characters. 48
'{' is not preceded with whitespace. 53
'{' is not preceded with whitespace. 54
'else' is not followed by whitespace. 61
'{' is not preceded with whitespace. 61
Expected @param tag for 'e'. 75
Expected @param tag for 'e'. 83


and 4 fingbugs warnings all of which are unused variables.

UrF Unread field: lnp.FiringDock.enemy In class lnp.FiringDock Field lnp.FiringDock.enemy At FiringDock.java:[line 19]
UrF Unread field: lnp.FiringDock.gunDirection In class lnp.FiringDock Field lnp.FiringDock.gunDirection At FiringDock.java:[line 23]
UrF Unread field: lnp.FiringDock.turnCount In class lnp.FiringDock Field lnp.FiringDock.turnCount At FiringDock.java:[line 22]
UuF Unused field: lnp.FiringDock.direction In class lnp.FiringDock Field lnp.FiringDock.direction In FiringDock.java

After executing ant command for the three QA tools above, I partially agree on how useful the QA tools are. While I don't have any problem follow the screencast of build pmj-decruzer, I am not quite sure about the accuracy and reliability of using automate check style tool for a high complex program. It seems that the automate checking style is very accurate for the FiringDock as it only consist of few classes. Digging through each section of the code just to fix the whitespace issue probably not a real solution for a high-level complexity program.

Download the FiringDock distriubiton here.