overview pyramid – Simple Oriented Architecture

Quality

Computing the Overview Pyramid metrics with NDepend

The Overview Pyramid describes and characterizes the structure of an object oriented system by looking at three main areas: size and complexity, coupling and inheritance. This visualization technique has been defined by Radu Marinescu and Michele Lanza in their book Object-Oriented Metrics in Practice. In this blog post we’ll see how to compute all the necessary metrics by using NDepend.

The Overview Pyramid

Example Overview Pyramid — source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Overview_pyramid.jpg

The purpose of the Overview Pyramid is to provide a high level overview of any object oriented system. It does this by putting in one place some of the most important measurements about a software system. The left part describes the Size and Complexity. The right part describes the System Coupling. The top part describes the inheritance usage.

Books, Quality

Book Review: Object-Oriented Metrics in Practice

I have been using static code analyzers for a while now. While these are useful, you need to spend a lot of time analyzing warnings and issues. And the problem is that, after you first run one of the static code analysis tools on a legacy project, you are overwhelmed by the number of issues. Object-Oriented Metrics in Practice, by Michele Lanza and Radu Marinescu, shows us how to use metrics effectively. It shows how to combine metrics in order to spot design flaws. This book also presents some novel visualization techniques. These are a great way to understand and visualize a complex system.