Plato

What do you like best?

I like that this tool is extremely easy to install and use. You can get up and running within 10 minutes. Almost every JavaScript developer already has node installed so it is a simple global module installation and you have access to the plato command. When you run the command pointing it to your JavaScript files, HTML pages are generated containing the static analysis reports. There are a lot of great charts and useful metrics on what JavaScript files might be too complicated and need refactoring. You can dive into each file and it will suggest potential issues as well for each line of code. If you want to impress your team with some neat and useful tooling, this is one I'd use. I also like the fact that Plato maintains a JSON file containing a history of scores for every time you ran it. With that, you can put a process on your CI server that runs Plato and you can check if the maintainability score went up or down on every commit and do things like trigger failed builds if the new commits decrease the project maintainability scores by too much.

What do you dislike?

I wish the "Average Maintainability" metric provided tips on how to improve your score. I have heard that not many projects get over 80, but sometimes I don't know what I can do to improve the application's maintainability score.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

The time and learning investment is small, so why not try it?

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

My teams in the past have used Plato as one way to evaluate the quality of our JavaScript before and after refactoring and as a way to constantly monitor it as new code is added to the project. Because this tool keeps a history of every time it was ran, you can see if your JavaScript quality goes up or down. I have used it to identify potential problems in my code and quickly assess which files need refactoring since Plato points this out in red.