Measuring Your Code

One of the biggest problems of software projects is that, while the practice of software development is commonly thought of as engineering, it is inherently a creative discipline; hence, many things about it are hard to measure. While simple yardsticks like test coverage and cyclomatic complexity are important for code quality, what other metrics can we apply to answer questions about our code? What coding conventions or development practices can we implement to make our code easier to measure? We'll take a tour through some processes and tools you can implement to begin improving code quality in your team or organization, and see what a difference it makes to long-term project maintainability. More importantly, we'll look at how we can move beyond today's tools to answer higher-level questions of code quality. Can 'good code' be quantified?