This post is part of my “Steal This Idea” series: free ideas for anyone to take and run with. Learn more about #StealThisIdea.
As a software developer, it’s incredibly common to browse a codebase and find that the functionality that was advertised doesn’t really exist.
Maybe the function or class method is there, but where there should be some brilliant logic, instead there’s a comment to the effect of “TODO: actually implement this.”
It’s frustrating, especially if you know that the developer who wrote that comment is long-gone, but what can you do? The nature of the industry is that we’re hopping between projects (or jobs) almost constantly; how can anyone remember all of the “when I get time, I need to get back to that” demands on them?
The Idea
What if there was a language-agnostic parser that could scan a codebase for to-do comments, then create associated tickets in an issue tracker?
The tool could be completely language agnostic, too: if it finds anything that looks like a to-do that doesn’t have a ticket URL associated with it, compile a list and either create the tickets or notify the development team.
It could even go a step further and, when available, perform a git blame to see how long the to-do has existed in the codebase.
This could be extremely useful as a GitHub bot, much like Dependabot.
To-Do patterns
When I originally wrote down this idea, I also captured a list of common to-do patterns I’ve seen in codebases; if you run with this idea, you’d probably want to capture all of the following:
- TODO
- @todo
- @TODO
- TO-DO
- TODO:
- TO-DO:
- TO DO
- TO DO:
- TO DO –
Overall, this seems like something that may very well exist, but if it doesn’t it would be great to incorporate it into a continuous integration pipeline.
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