Over the course of the fall and winter, I’ve been gaining momentum with code research posts.  Today, I bring that momentum to bear on the subject of functional programming.  Or at least, on functional style of programming in C# codebases.

But before I do that, let me provide a little background in case you haven’t caught the previous posts in the series.  It started with me doing automated static analysis on 100 codebases to see how singletons impact those codebases.  Next up, I used that data to look at how unit tests affect codebases.  That post generated a lot of buzz, so I enlisted a partner to help with statistical analysis and then boosted the codebase sample size up to 500.

At the end of that last post, I suggested some future topics of study.  Well, now I’ve picked one: functional programming.

What Is Functional Programming?

The idea with this post is mostly to report on findings, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t provide at least some background so that anyone reading has some context.  So first, let’s cover the topic of functional programming briefly.

Functional programming is one of the major programming paradigms.  Specifically, its calling card is that it disallows side effects.  In other words, it models the rules of math, in which the result of the function (or method) is purely a deterministic function of its inputs.

So, in pseudo-code, it looks like this:

This is a functional method.  But if you do something like this

or like this

then you’re out of the functional realm because you’re adding side effects.  These two modified versions of Add() each concern themselves with the world beyond processing the inputs to add.  (As an aside, you could “fix” this by passing the global variable or the _databasePlopper dependency to the method as a parameter.)

Now, take note of something because this matters to the rest of the post.  While C# (or any other object-oriented language) is not a functional language, per se, you can write functional methods in C#.

Continue reading Functional Programming Makes Your Code Not OO…And That’s It

Today, I give you the third post in a series about how unit tests affect codebases.

The first one wound up getting a lot of attention, which was fun.  In it, I presented some analysis I’d done of about 100 codebases.  I had formed hypotheses about how I thought unit tests would affect codebases, and then I tested those hypotheses.

In the second post, I incorporated a lot of the feedback that I had requested in the first post.  Specifically, I partnered with someone to do more rigorous statistical analysis on the raw data that I’d found.  The result was much more clarity about not only the correlations among code properties but also how much confidence we could have in those relationships.  Some had strong relationships while others were likely spurious.

In this post, though, I’m incorporating the single biggest piece of feedback.  I’m analyzing more codebases.

Analysis of 500 (ish) C# Codebases

Performing static analysis on and recording information about 500 codebases isn’t especially easy.  To facilitate this, I’ve done significant work automating ingestion of codebases:

• Enabling autonomous batch operation
• Logging which codebases fail and why
• Building in redundancy against accidentally analyzing the same codebase twice.
• Executing not just builds but also NuGet package restores and other build steps.

That’s been a big help, but there’s still the matter of finding these codebases.  To do that, I mined a handful of “awesome codebase” lists, like this one.  I pointed the analysis tool at something like 750 codebases, and it naturally filters out any that don’t compile or otherwise have trouble in the automated process.

This left me with 503 valid codebases.  That number came down to 495 once adjusted for codebases that, for whatever reason, didn’t have any (non-third party) methods or types or that were otherwise somehow trivial.

So the results here are the results of using NDepend for static analysis on 495 C# codebases.

Continue reading Unit Tests Correlate With Desirable Codebase Properties

About a month ago, I wrote a post about how unit tests affect (and apparently don’t affect) codebases.  That post turned out to be quite popular, which is exciting.  You folks gave a lot of great feedback about where we might next take the study.  I’ve incorporated some of that feedback and have a followup on the unit test effect on codebases.

Summarized briefly, here are the high points of this second installment and refinement of the study:

• Eliminating the “buckets” from the last time.
• Introducing more statistical rigor.
• Qualifying and refining conclusions from last time.

Also, for the purposes of this post, please keep in mind that non-incorporation of feedback is not a rejection of that feedback.  I plan to continue refinement but also to keep posting about progress.

Addressing Some of the Easier Questions and Requests

Before getting started, I’ll answer a few of the quicker-to-answer items that arose out of the comments.

Did your analysis count unit test methods when assessing cyclomatic complexity, etc.?

Yes.  It might be interesting to discount unit test methods and re-run analysis, and I may do that at some point.

Can you show the code you’re using?  Which codebases did you use?

The scraping/analysis tooling I’ve built using the NDepend API is something that I use in my consulting practice and is in a private repo.  As for the list of specific codebases, I’m thinking I’ll publish that following the larger sample size study.  In the most general terms, I’m going through pages like this that list (mostly) C# repos and using their links.

What about different/better categorization of unit test quality (test coverage, bolted on later vs. written throughout vs. demonstrably test driven)?  

This is definitely something I want to address, but the main barrier here is how non-trivial this is to assess from a data-gathering perspective.  So I will do this, but it will also take time.

Think of even just the anecdotally “easy” problem of determining TDD vs. non-TDD.  I approximated this by positing that test-driving will create a certain ratio of test methods to production methods since any production method will be preceded by a test method (notwithstanding future extract method refactorings).  We could, perhaps, do better by auditing source control history and looking for a certain commit cadence (modification to equal numbers of test/production classes, for instance).  But that’s hard, and it doesn’t account for situations with large batch commits, for instance.

The upshot is that it’s going to take some doing, but I think we collectively can figure it out.

Continue reading The Unit Test Effect Study, Refined

I’ve just wrapped up another study.  (The last one was about singletons, if you’re interested.) This time, I looked at unit testing and the impact it has on codebases.

It didn’t turn out the way I expected.

I’m willing to bet that it also won’t turn out that you expected these results.  It had a profound effect on certain unexpected codebase properties while having minimal effect on some that seem like no-brainers.  But I’ll get to the specifics of that shortly.

First, let me explain a bit about expectations and methodology.

Unit Testing: The Expected Effect on Code

Let’s be clear for a moment here.  I’m not talking about the expected effect of unit tests on outcomes. You might say, “We believe in unit testing because it reduces defects” or, “We unit test to document our design intentions,” and I didn’t (and probably can’t) measure those things.

When I talk about the effect of unit testing, I’m talking about the effect it has on the codebase itself.  Let’s consider a concrete example to make it clear what I mean.  You can’t (without a lot of chicanery) unit test private methods, and you can’t easily unit test internal methods.  This creates a natural incentive to make more methods public, so we might expect heavily unit-tested codebases to feature more public methods.

This actually turns out to be true.

I’ll talk more about the axes later in the post.  But for now, check out the plot and the trend line.  More unit testing means a higher percentage of public methods.  Score one for that hypothesis!

With a win there, let’s think of some other hypotheses that seem plausible.  Methods with more “going on” tend to be harder to test.  So you’d expect relatively simple methods in a highly tested codebase.  To get specific, here was what I anticipated in heavily tested codebases:

• Less cyclomatic complexity per method.
• Fewer lines of code per method.
• Lower nesting depth.
• Fewer method overloads.
• Fewer parameters.

I also had some thoughts about the impact on types:

• More interfaces (this makes testing easier).
• Less inheritance (makes testing harder).
• More cohesion.
• Fewer lines of code.
• Fewer comments.

Continue reading Unit Testing Doesn’t Affect Codebases the Way You Would Think