What are Quick Wins?

Quick Wins are a unique feature of codebeat which allows developers to see which quality violations have the biggest impact on their project. This section contains a list of 5 issues with the largest impact on your GPA.

But they're not quick!

Some issues are easier to fix than others. Code duplications are generally a pleasure to refactor - moving shared code to a separate function or namespace feels good, takes relatively little time and provides a quick boost to project maintainability. On the other hand problems like too many functions in a class indicate bad design and are harder to address quickly. While we try to give some boost to quick wins we don't want to turn a blind eye to egregious quality violations and pretend that a meaningful refactor is a walk in the park.

That being said, if you are very focused on your GPA (which is probably not a good idea) you can always find lower-hanging fruit and start addressing copy pasta first which should give you a nice confidence boost.

I addressed the problem and my GPA did not improve!

It is possible that addressing a single Quick Win does not improve the GPA. The grading algorithm works by subtracting penalties for different violations from a perfect GPA score of 4.0. This means that a GPA for a given namespace could be theoretically be negative but we never allow the GPA to go below 0. If your namespace is really really bad and you fix a single issue your GPA might have actually increased (say from -8 to -2) but you won't notice it because the namespace is still below the magical threshold of 0. The only thing you can really do in this case is keep fixing further issues in this namespace and you will eventually see improvements.

But I don't care about my GPA!

Quick Wins are indeed focused on GPA. If you completely don't care about that score then you may see less value in this section. However, this is not necessarily the case. Quick Wins will show you the most egregious quality violations that are worth fixing on their own.