NDepend

Improve your .NET code quality with NDepend

What Makes a Codebase Acquirable?

What makes a codebase acquirable? This is the rare question that affects software developers, managers, and executives in a surprisingly similar way.  And that’s saying something since, by and large,...
Erik Dietrich May 15, 2018

Code Coverage Should Not Be a Management Concern

You could easily find yourself mired in programmer debates over code coverage.  Here’s one, for instance.  It raged on for hundreds of votes, dozens of comments, many answers, and eight...
Erik Dietrich July 27, 2017

In Defense of Using Your Users as Software Testers

In most shops of any size, you’ll find a person that’s just a little too cynical.  I’m a little cynical myself, and we programmers tend to skew that way.  But this...
Erik Dietrich June 15, 2017

How to Use NDepend’s Trend Charts

Imagine a scene for a moment.  A year earlier, a corporate VP spun up a major software project for his organization.  He brought a slew of his organization’s software developers into...
Erik Dietrich June 8, 2017

How to Evaluate Your Static Analysis Process

I often get inquiries from clients and prospects about setting up and operationalizing static analysis.  This makes sense.  After all, we live in a world short on time and with...
Erik Dietrich April 27, 2017

Pulling Your Team Through a Project Crunch

Society dictates, for the most part, that childhood serves as a dress rehearsal for adulthood.  Sure, we go to school and learn to read, write, and ‘rithmetic, but we also...
Erik Dietrich April 20, 2017

What DevOps Means for Static Analysis

For most of my career, software development has, in a very specific way, resembled mailing a letter.  You write the thing, and then you go through the standard mail piece...
Erik Dietrich April 13, 2017

Computing Technical Debt with NDepend

For years, I have struggled to articulate technical debt to non-technical stakeholders.  This struggle says something, given that technical debt makes an excellent metaphor in and of itself. The concept...
Erik Dietrich February 16, 2017

What Metrics Should the CIO See?

I’ve worked in the programming industry long enough to remember a less refined time.  During this time, the CIO (or CFO, since IT used to report to the CFO in...
Erik Dietrich February 2, 2017

Recovering from a Mission Critical Whiff

A career in software produces a handful of truly iconic moments.  First, you beam with pride the first time something you wrote works in production.  Then, you recoil in horror...
Erik Dietrich January 26, 2017

The Relationship Between Team Size and Code Quality

Over the last few years, I’ve had the occasion to observe lots of software teams.  These teams come in all shapes and sizes, as the saying goes.  And, not surprisingly,...
Erik Dietrich January 19, 2017

The Best Christmas Present to Give Your Developers

When Christmas time arrives, it comes with the need to buy gifts, eat too much food, and attend various gatherings. All of that comes awkwardly together each year in the...
Erik Dietrich January 5, 2017

New Year’s Resolutions for Code Quality

Perhaps more than any other holiday I can think of, New Year’s Day has specific traditions.  With other holidays, they range all over the map.  While Christmas has trees, presents, rotund...
Erik Dietrich December 29, 2016

How Much Code Should My Developers Be Responsible For?

As I work with more and more organizations, my compiled list of interesting questions grows.  Seriously – I have quite the backlog.  And I don’t mean interesting in the pejorative...
Erik Dietrich December 8, 2016

How to Scale Your Static Analysis Tooling

If you wander the halls of a large company with a large software development organization, you will find plenty of examples of practice and process at scale.  When you see this...
Erik Dietrich December 1, 2016

Alternatives to Lines of Code (LOC)

It amazes me that in 2016, I still hear the occasional story of some software team manager measuring developer productivity by committed lines of code (LOC) per day.  In fact,...
Erik Dietrich November 23, 2016

Making Devs, Architects, and Managers Happy with the Static Analysis Tool

Organizations come to possess a static analysis tool in a variety of ways.  In some cases, management decides on some kind of quality initiative and buys the tool to make...
Erik Dietrich October 27, 2016

Static Analysis for the Build Machine?

I remember my earliest experiences with static analysis.  Probably a decade ago, I started to read about it during grad school and poke around with it at work.  Immediately, I...
Erik Dietrich October 20, 2016

The Relationship between Static Analysis and Continuous Testing

As an adult, I have learned that I have an introvert type personality.  I do alright socially, don’t mind public speaking, and do not (I don’t think) present as an...
Erik Dietrich October 13, 2016

How to Perform Effective Team Code Reviews

I’ve heard people say (paraphrased) that teams succeed uniformly, but fail each in its own unique way.  While I might argue the veracity of this statement, it evokes an interesting...
Erik Dietrich October 6, 2016

Rewrite or Refactor?

I’ve trod this path before in various incarnations and I’ll do it again today.  After all, I can think of few topics in software development that draw as much debate...
Erik Dietrich September 29, 2016

Secrets of Maintainable Codebases

You should write maintainable code.  I assume people have told you this at some point.  The admonishment is as obligatory as it is vague.  So, I’m sure, when you heard...
Erik Dietrich September 28, 2016

How to Get Company Coding Standards Right (and Wrong)

Nothing compares with the first week on a new job or team.  You experience an interesting swirl of anticipation, excitement, novelty, nervousness, and probably various other emotions I’m forgetting.  What...
Erik Dietrich September 8, 2016

Keep Your Codebase Fit with Trend Metrics

A while back, I wrote a post about the importance of trends when discussing code metrics.  Metrics have an impact when teams are first exposed to them, but that tends...
Erik Dietrich September 1, 2016

Considering a Port to .NET Core? Use NDepend

An American colloquialism holds, “only two things are certain: death and taxes.”  If I had to appropriate that for the software industry, I might say that the two certainties are death and...
Erik Dietrich August 25, 2016

Measure Your Code to Get Back on Track

When I’m called in for strategy advice on a codebase, I never arrive to find a situation where all parties want to tell me how wonderfully things are going.  As...
Erik Dietrich August 11, 2016

How to Deliver Software Projects on Time

Someone asked me recently, almost in passing, about the keys to delivering software projects on time.  In this particular instance, it was actually a question of how to deliver .NET...
Erik Dietrich July 28, 2016

Static Analysis Isn’t Just for Techies

I do a lot of work with and around static analysis tools.  Obviously, I write for this blog.  I also have a consulting practice that includes detailed codebase and team...
Erik Dietrich July 21, 2016

Avoid Technical Debt with NDepend

The term “technical debt” has become ubiquitous in the programming world.  In the most general sense, it reflects the idea that you’re doing something easy in the moment, but that...
Erik Dietrich July 14, 2016

How to Get Developers to Adopt Coding Standards

If you’re a manager, there’s a decent chance that the subject of coding standards makes you want to bang your head against a wall repeatedly.  If you’re a developer, you...
Erik Dietrich June 2, 2016