Crap4Net

Measuring code quality is a tricky business at best. More then a few attempts has been made over the years however still a single solution has yet to emerge. The C.R.A.P metric has been born a few years ago and tries to combine code complexity along with Code coverage to indicate (to some extent) the quality of a given piece of code. There’s much more to say about the C.R.A.P metric which ill leave for the experts . I will say however that more information can be gathered in the Crap4J website.

Over the last weeks I have been working on creating the Crap$Net project. The Idea is to bring the C.R.a.P metric into the world of .NET development by supporting the various tools used in this world.

I am happy to say I managed to wrap this effort into an open source project which was published today over at CodePlex, you can view the project home page here.

For now the tool is able to take the resulting xml reports generated for Code coverage and for Cyclomatic Complexity and generate a single XMl containing the C.R.A.P data. nothing too fancy but for starter this should do. the tool currently supports Coverage data generated by PartCover or by MsTest internal coverage tool . Cyclomatic Complexity data is generated by using the Code Metric add-in of Reflector. What was important to me is the ability to take this tool and plug it into a continuous build cycle and less the visibility of the data.

Future plans span two mains directions, the first is to include support of other coverage tools (if you have any preferences please leave me a comment) and if needed other formats of Cyclomatic Complexity reports. the second is to add some more fancy reporting which will include a basic html summary and maybe even some more stats on the underlying code.

So if you ever wondered how Crappy is your code, done wonder just download and get an answer.

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Posted in: Crap4Net,Metrics,Quality,tools,Unit Tests

Agile Testing Days

Ill be going to the Agile Testing Days conference in October and will be giving a session on "Quality and Short Release Cycle". It's my first time speaking at such a big conference along leading figures in our industry so I'm very excited and quite nervous.

on a similar note the latest issue of "Testing experience" journal has been released and includes an article of mine (page 16). The issue is all about Agile Testing, includes some very interesting articles and can be downloaded here.

Let me know what you think.

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Posted in: Quality

Myth Busted - NOT

In a recent post Scott Ambler starts by claiming

Agile Myth:High Quality Costs Less than Low Quality - Busted! (at scale)

later on when reading the actual content Ive learnt that he refers to very specific cases :

For example, in situations where the regulatory compliance
scaling factor is applicable, particularly regulations around protecting human life (i.e. the FDA's CFR 21 Part 11), you find that some of the URPS requirements require a greater investment in quality which can increase overall development cost and time.

and

This is particularly true when you need to start meeting 4-nines requirements (i.e. the system needs to be available 99.99% of the time) let alone 5-nines requirements or more. The cost of thorough testing and inspection can rise substantially in these sorts of situations.

In my opinion he went a little off charts with his claim.

First is the exact "Myth" so to speak? Is it a simple "High quality cost less"?

Well actually its a little more subtle than that. What the agile community has found once and again (as Scott mentions) is that it cost less to work in high quality mode, when you need to reach and sustain acceptable quality. After all quality is infectious. In general it cost less to produce crappy systems, but mostly those just fails when quality needs catch up.

But back to the examples.

I don't have experience with life critical systems. However, is there a possibility that what actually cost are the regulations themselves and not the underlying quality? Is there a way to reach the necessary life safety quality without following those costly regulations (at lower costs)? I don't know, I do know is that the FDA regulations are costly to implement and originate in a time before the Agile paradigm shift.

High Available (HA) system, on the other hand, I do understand. In fact I was in charge of developing a HA solution for a big billing company. And here Scott argument falls short.

Reaching 4 and especially 5-nines has nothing to do with the quality of the developed system. In order to get to that level of availability you must have an integrated solution and there lies the cost of 5nine systems.

So what myth has been busted?

Yes there are cases in which a specific aspects of quality will drive costs up. But taking a very specific examples and generalizing it to "Busted (at scale)" that an obvious Mistake in my book.

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Posted in: Agile practices,Engineering Practices,Quality