How to Add Static Analysis to Your Development Process
March 31, 2016 2 minutes read As a consultant, one of the more universal things that I’ve observed over the years is managerial hand-waving. This comes in a lot with the...
Legacy Code for Developers: Managing your Manager
March 24, 2016 2 minutes read Here’s a campfire horror story of legacy code that probably sounds at least somewhat familiar. One day, your manager strolls by casually, sipping a...
Static Analysis for Small Business
March 10, 2016 1 minutes read I was asked recently, kind of off the cuff, whether I thought that static analysis made sense for small business. I must admit that...
A Visual Studio script that saves time and pain
March 7, 2016 2 minutes read After years of pain, I finally found a clean-and-definitive way to get rid of the dreadful issue Could not copy assembly, the process cannot...
A Manager’s Guide to Legacy Code
March 3, 2016 2 minutes read If you have a sadistic streak and manage a team of software developers, it’s probably high entertainment to dredge up some old, dusty piece...
The Better Code Book – Our MVPs of 2015
February 24, 2016 3 minutes read We firmly believe spaghetti belongs on the dinner table and not in code. Our mission when starting NDepend was to create a tool to...
How Siemens Healthcare manages over 500 million lines of code – An NDepend Case Study
February 23, 2016 1 minutes read Siemens Healthcare produces imaging equipment for the medical sector in a variety of fields and is based in Germany. Looking to reduce development costs on...
Let’s Build a Metric Reconsidered
February 18, 2016 2 minutes read If you’ve been keeping track, you’ll noticed that it’s been a while since the last post in this series. In case you’d forgotten or...
Bridging the Communication Gap Between Developers and Architects
February 12, 2016 1 minutes read If you want to set off a ceaseless, spirited discussion, ask a roomful of people what makes some music good and other music bad....
Put a Little NDepend in your Visual Studio
February 4, 2016 1 minutes read The software development world is filled with what I think of as “Coke-Pepsi” debates. This is how my brain categorizes debates over preference that...
Calculating the ROI of NDepend
January 28, 2016 3 minutes read Years ago, I discovered NDepend and downloaded it for a trial. At the time, I found myself working in a .NET shop where a...
That Code’s Not Dead – It Went To a Farm Upstate… And You’re Paying For It
January 21, 2016 2 minutes read When it comes to pets, there’s a heartbreaking lie that parents often tell little children when they believe that those children are not yet...
The Case for the NDepend Dashboard Feature
January 14, 2016 2 minutes read If you hang around agile circles long enough, you’re quite likely to hear the terms “big, visible chart” and “information radiator.” I think both...
Visualizing Your (Real) Software Architecture
January 11, 2016 1 minutes read Diagrams of software architecture have a certain aesthetic appeal to them. They usually consist of grayscale or muted pastel colors and nice, soft shapes with...
With Code Metrics, Trends are King
December 31, 2015 2 minutes read Here’s a scene that’s familiar to any software developer. You sit down to work with the source code of a new team or project...
Let’s Build a Metric: Global and Local Scope
December 24, 2015 4 minutes read Last time in this series, I began an exploration of how a method might be impacted by the scope of the variables that it...
Be Careful with Software Metaphors
December 17, 2015 6 minutes read Over the years, there have been any number of popular software metaphors that help people radically misunderstand the realities of software development. Probably the...
The Most Important Code Metrics You’ve Never Heard Of
December 10, 2015 6 minutes read Oh, how I hope you don’t measure developer productivity by lines of code. As Bill Gates once ably put it, “measuring software productivity by lines...
NDepend updated to Version 6.2
December 3, 2015 2 minutes read NDepend version 6.2 has just been released. We have addressed over 20 bug fixes, including a blocker one for Visual Studio 2015 update 1 Git...
Let’s Build a Metric: Using CQLinq to Reason about Application State
December 3, 2015 4 minutes read I’ve been letting the experiments run for a bit before posting results so as to give all participants enough time to submit, if they...
Mistakes Dev Managers Make
November 26, 2015 2 minutes read Managing a team of software developers is a tall order. This is doubly true when the line management includes both org chart duties (career...
Let’s Build a Metric: Incorporating Results and Exploring CQLinq
November 19, 2015 4 minutes read It turns out I was wrong in the last post, at least if the early returns from the second experiment are to be believed....
Refactoring is a Development Technique, Not a Project
November 12, 2015 2 minutes read One of the more puzzling misconceptions that I hear pertains to the topic of refactoring. I consult on a lot of legacy rescue efforts,...
NDepend Case Study: Increasing Development Efficiency in the Medical Laboratory Sector
November 11, 2015 2 minutes read Developing applications for use in the health care industry is stressful because the margin of error is almost non-existent. Whether your tool is for...
Let’s Build a Metric 7: Counting the Inputs
November 5, 2015 2 minutes read Over the last two Let’s Build a Metric installments of this series, I’ve talked about different ways to count lines of code and about...
Software Rewrite: The Chase
October 29, 2015 3 minutes read Last week, a post I wrote, “The Myth of the Software Rewrite“, became pretty popular. This generated a lot of comments and discussion, so...
Relax. Everyone’s Code Rots
October 22, 2015 2 minutes read I earn my living, or part of it, anyway, doing something very awkward. I get called in to assess and analyze codebases for health...
Let’s Build a Metric 6: Cyclomatic Complexity Explained
October 15, 2015 3 minutes read In the last installment of this series, I talked a good bit about lines of code. As it turns out, the question, “what is a...
Hidden Costs in Your Software
October 8, 2015 2 minutes read One of the things I remember most vividly from my CIO days was the RFP process for handling spikes in demands on my group’s time....
Let’s Build a Metric 5: Flavors of Lines of Code
October 1, 2015 1 minutes read The last episode of this series was heavy on theory, so let’s balance it out a bit with some applied science. The lofty goal...