Any tools to rate quality of codebase

[Jac Jones]

Hi,

does anybody know of any tools (or eclipse plugins) that goes thru the codebase and basically rates the quality of the code?

We have made substantial improvements to our codebase in the last 12months, but am struggling to convince management of this - so any suggestions here are appreciated!

thanks-

Jac

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Jac,
You could use a static analysis tool like PMD or FindBugs and show the # things flagged went down.

[Ilja Preuss]

Why do you need to convince management?

[Jac Jones]

Jeanne,

thanks for the suggestion - shall look into pmd.

Ilja, the reason is to help justify the amount of refactoring we have had to do - so it would be nice to have something 'objective'.


thanks.

[Ilja Preuss]

Originally posted by Jac Jones:
the reason is to help justify the amount of refactoring we have had to do - so it would be nice to have something 'objective'.

I my limited experience, management isn't very interested in code quality directly. What would probably help more are the benefits of the improved code quality, such as

"If we would have had to do X two years ago, it would have taken us weeks, but because of the improved code quality, it is now only taking hours."

or

"Implementing feature X is a breeze today. Two years ago it would have been near to impossible to implement, because the code was so much more rigid."

Having numbers for your code quality might be able to support those statements, but if my experience is typical, it's unlikely to work if standing alone.

Hope this helps...

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Also note that the word "quality" has a formal definition when it comes to software, and it has nothing to do with anything mentioned so far in this thread. A manager is likely to understand "software quality" to mean "the degree to which the software meets the requirements."