Static Analysis w/ NDepends – How good is your code?

This week we’re discussing NDpend, a static analysis tool for .NET.

Triage your biggest problems, Prioritize your refactoring, and CYA with real metrics and trend lines.

We also discuss hidden nuggets, Pintrest-envy, and we pour another one out for google reader.

News

TreeMap View

We received a free license for NDepend, and decided to check it out
What is NDepend and what does it do for you?
Had some stability issues initally, Allen’s problem turned out to be Visual Studio Tools for Git
Build Server license/version – perfect for your CI server
Tons of functionality

Circle at the bottom right seems to be the quick key to navigating or the NDepend Menu in VS
Dashboard – quick glance at all the top items you should be trying to attend to in your project/solution
graphs changes over time (between snapshots)
Queries and rules explorer are very powerful – nice that you can actually see and modify the Linq that’s used to create the various reports – makes this incredibly flexible
View Reports of any number of coding issues…
Complexity report is a real eye opener
ILCC – IL Cyclomatic Complexity – anything over 20 should probably be refactored
Joe’s post Static Analysis of Open Source .NET Projects
Dependency graphs – neat
Dependency Matrix
Diff snapshots – Compare different versions of your code
Trend charts – track your progress!
Code metric view gives you a sense of the size of the various areas of your code
Import Code Coverage from tools like dotCover
Visual NDepend Standalone, VS Plugin, and Build Versions

Awesome rules, categories include
- Architecture and Layering
- Code Quality
- Dead Code
- Design
- Naming Conventions
- Object Oriented design
- Visibility
Love the Dependency Graph – ability to highlight objects (size) based off lines of code, dependencies, etc
Generated html report doesn’t have the functionality of the dashboard, but it is convienient
The Abstractness versus Instability Diagram helps to detect which assemblies are potentially painful to maintain (i.e concrete and stable) and which assemblies are potentially useless (i.e abstract and instable).
Abstractness: If an assembly contains many abstract types (i.e interfaces and abstract classes) and few concrete types, it is considered as abstract.
Stability: An assembly is considered stable if its types are used by a lot of types of tier assemblies. In this conditions stable means painful to modify.
The big benefit is tracking your project over time
Very friendly UI: Clicked “Generate a graph of…” brought up screenshots of how it works
Checkbox for “Recent rules violated”
Create trend chart

Occasionally awkward interface, shows the code for the rules rather than a description
Wish it had easy support for assembly segregation – (could do separate reports)
Doesn’t honor the Visual Studio theme
The UI windows show up somewhat randomly (VS issue?)
Tons of info: Multiple monitors is pretty much a necessity for using NDepend
Irritating that double-clicking a column header in the grids shrinks down the column to nothing rather than auto-expanding
When looking at the reports, mousing over a row pops up the details, although I wish it would lock to the row selected (if you have selected a row)
Manual installation process
Not seamless, needs to “attach” to a solution
Requires .NET 3.5 (for backwards compatibility?)

Coding Blocks – Right in the Sweet Spot!

Share the joy