coupling

Quality

Lines of code, cyclomatic complexity, coupling, cohesion, code coverage. You’ve probably heard about these metrics before. But do you actively track them? Should you? Visual Studio computes some of these metrics out of the box. But if you want to define a custom metric, you’re out of luck. Yet, there are a bunch of code metrics that you might find useful for your code base. More so, a composite metric might be more helpful than the sum of its parts. For example, the C.R.A.P. Metric detects complex code that is not covered by unit tests. How can you track such a metric in Visual Studio? In this article we’ll see how to visualize code metrics, add custom metrics and how to monitor trends with NDepend.

Code Metrics

NDepend computes many metrics out of the box. You can use the intellisense support to discover the standard metrics for a given code element:

Computer Code Metrics

But it would be hard to extract information from these metrics if all we got was a bunch of numbers. We need other techniques to help us break down the complexity of the data. Visualization techniques complement metrics, by making it easier to synthesize and digest this information.

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Clean Code, Quality

How do you manage dependencies in your project? Since an image speaks a thousand words, I’ve always been a fan of visual management. Unfortunately, Visual Studio Professional doesn’t provide a way to do this. In the Premium and Enterprise editions you can visualize code dependencies on dependency graphs. But I don’t think this is enough. An architectural diagram with every assembly or namespace in my solution doesn’t tell me that much. It contains too much information.

Fortunately, there is a tool that can help you manage dependencies in the .Net world: NDepend (there is also a Java port – JArchitect). NDepend is a static analysis tool that, among other things, allows you to visualize dependencies. After I first ran NDepend on a project, I was overwhelmed with information. Then I took some time to play around and discover what can it tell me about my solution. NDepend integrates into Visual Studio quite nicely and points you in the right direction through tool tips and links. This is useful for people who prefer learning by doing. Aside from giving you information, it also tells you what to do with that information.

NDepend has two main views for managing dependencies: the Dependency Graph and the Dependency Structure Matrix. Apart from these, there is also an Abstractness vs Instability report that can be helpful. In this blog post, we’ll discuss some of the things that these views can tell you about your solution.

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