During the last few weeks I’ve been participating in an email discussion about the relationship between static analysis tools (such as Reek) and TDD. The discussion was instigated by Pat Eyler, and he has now organised and posted the results on his On-Ruby blog.

To help me get an initial handle on the topic, I found it extremely useful to list the main areas of discomfort I feel when using Reek in my own work. Then for each of these (there were two) I constructed conflict clouds to get a balanced view of the problem. I don’t have the clouds to hand now, but you can read the results in Pat’s article. I’ll definitely be using that technique again, because it very quickly helped me to organise my thoughts. (Note to self: throw nothing away.)