Option #4 is just option #3 but keeping the costs of running tests you ignore.
You're right about excessive warnings, but then sometimes note. Running `gcc -Wall` used to be considered madness, and if you did it now on a codebase that has been around a while and not kept clean, you'd drown in messages. The key is to turn it on from the very start and fix things when there are 10 warnings instead of 1000.
This decay happens with test suites, too. One or two tests start to fail, and instead of fixing them, people ignore the failures. A bit later, it's five tests, then 10, and pretty soon the programmers see the tests as broken instead of looking at the failures that let things get to the point where there are so many failing tests.
The fix for both situations is similar though; dial down the {warning strictness|number of tests run} until you get a clean {warnings|test-run} then enable them one by one in order of how easy they are to fix.
You're right about excessive warnings, but then sometimes note. Running `gcc -Wall` used to be considered madness, and if you did it now on a codebase that has been around a while and not kept clean, you'd drown in messages. The key is to turn it on from the very start and fix things when there are 10 warnings instead of 1000.
This decay happens with test suites, too. One or two tests start to fail, and instead of fixing them, people ignore the failures. A bit later, it's five tests, then 10, and pretty soon the programmers see the tests as broken instead of looking at the failures that let things get to the point where there are so many failing tests.