Expert Python Programming - Third Edition

Useful tools

Common conventions and practices used in a software project should always be documented. But having proper documentation for guidelines is often not enough to enforce that these guidelines are actually followed. Fortunately, you can use automated tools that can check sources of your code and verify if it meets specific naming conventions and style guidelines.

The following are a few popular tools:

• pylint: This is a very flexible source code analyzer
• pycodestyle and flake8: This is a small code style checker and a wrapper that adds to it some more useful features, such as static analysis and complexity measurement