A Visual Studio script that saves time and pain
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 access the file because it is...
A Manager’s Guide to Legacy Code
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 of software and then to task...
NDepend vs. ReSharper
Not too long ago, someone asked me for a comparison of ReSharper (commonly and affectionately abbreviated R#) and NDepend. I didn’t really grok the question, so I asked, “in what...
The Better Code Book – Our MVPs of 2015
We firmly believe spaghetti belongs on the dinner table and not in code. Our mission when starting NDepend was to create a tool to make best coding practices easier to...
How Siemens Healthcare manages over 500 million lines of code – An NDepend Case Study
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 the next generation of medical imaging...
Let’s Build a Metric Reconsidered
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 lost track, the primary goal is to...
Bridging the Communication Gap Between Developers and Architects
If you want to set off a ceaseless, spirited discussion, ask a roomful of people what makes some music good and other music bad. The opinions are likely to be...
Put a Little NDepend in your Visual Studio
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 are almost entirely subjective. There is...
Calculating the ROI of NDepend
Years ago, I discovered NDepend and downloaded it for a trial. At the time, I found myself working in a .NET shop where a lot of developers worked in the...
That Code’s Not Dead – It Went To a Farm Upstate… And You’re Paying For It
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 ready to wrap their heads around...
The Case for the NDepend Dashboard Feature
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 of these loosely originate from the...
Visualizing Your (Real) Software Architecture
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 rounded edges. The architects that make...
With Code Metrics, Trends are King
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 for the first time, pull the...
Let’s Build a Metric: Global and Local Scope
Last time in this series, I began an exploration of how a method might be impacted by the scope of the variables that it uses. The idea is that it’s...
Be Careful with Software Metaphors
Over the years, there have been any number of popular software metaphors that help people radically misunderstand the realities of software development. Probably the most famous and persistent one is...
The Most Important Code Metrics You’ve Never Heard Of
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 of code is like measuring progress...
NDepend updated to Version 6.2
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 Controls. More specifically the new Visual...
Let’s Build a Metric: Using CQLinq to Reason about Application State
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 so choose. So, I’ll refresh everyone’s...
Mistakes Dev Managers Make
Managing a team of software developers is a tall order. This is doubly true when the line management includes both org chart duties (career development, HR administrivia, etc) and responsibility...
Let’s Build a Metric: Incorporating Results and Exploring CQLinq
It turns out I was wrong in the last post, at least if the early returns from the second experiment are to be believed. Luckily, the scientific method allows for...
Refactoring is a Development Technique, Not a Project
One of the more puzzling misconceptions that I hear pertains to the topic of refactoring. I consult on a lot of legacy rescue efforts, and refactoring, and people in and...
NDepend Case Study: Increasing Development Efficiency in the Medical Laboratory Sector
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 treatment, research, or analysis, it needs...
Let’s Build a Metric 7: Counting the Inputs
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 ways to count different paths through...
Software Rewrite: The Chase
Last week, a post I wrote, “The Myth of the Software Rewrite“, became pretty popular. This generated a lot of comments and discussion, so I decided just to write a...
Relax. Everyone’s Code Rots
I earn my living, or part of it, anyway, doing something very awkward. I get called in to assess and analyze codebases for health and maintainability. As you can no...
Let’s Build a Metric 6: Cyclomatic Complexity Explained
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 line of code?” is actually more...
Hidden Costs in Your Software
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. In case you haven’t participated in...
Let’s Build a Metric 5: Flavors of Lines of Code
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 of this series of posts is...
Bringing Objectivity to Clean Code
If you want to stir up a pretty serious amount of discussion-churn, wander over to where the software developers sit and ask for a consensus definition of “clean code.” This...
The Myth of the Software Rewrite
“We can’t go on like this. We need to rewrite this thing from scratch.” The Writing is on the Wall These words infuriate CIOs and terrify managers and directors of...
