Productivity Tip–Add Your FxCop Project to the Solution

I’m very interested in streamlining the workflow that our team uses when developing. That means I need to make the process get out of our way as much as possible. Sometimes, small changes can make a big difference in your overall productivity.

To some, code analysis is a waste of time, but our team sees it as a vital step in ensuring high quality code in the application. Obviously, I don’t want to forego code analysis, but I would like it to be as unobtrusive as possible.

As Martin Fowler says, “if it hurts, do it more often”. Committing changes that break the continuous build for something simple like code analysis violations is a waste of valuable cycles. So we do it earlier and more often. We’ve simply added the .fxcop file to our solution and added all of the project outputs to the project. Now, before committing our changes, we simply run the analysis prior to our commit and eliminate the breaks before they break the build.

This keeps our CruiseControl projects green longer and reduces the churn of having to rebuild to fix something we shouldn’t have committed in the first place.

I suggest that in your team retrospectives you reflect on your daily practices and look for small, quick wins like this. You’d be amazed at how much time throughout your day you can reclaim by eliminating friction points like this.