Why Linting Belongs in Your Testing Strategy

Most teams think of linting and testing as two separate activities. Linting is the cheap, fast check that runs on every commit and flags style problems, suspicious code, and risky patterns. Testing is the deeper check that proves behavior. In practice, the two are closely related. A test suite full of Thread.sleep() calls, swallowed exceptions, or assertions that can never fail is a test suite that gives you false confidence. Linting catches those problems before they turn into flaky builds and missed regressions.

If you build Java services, you probably already run a compiler, JUnit, and maybe SonarQube somewhere in the pipeline.…