Code improvement tools - NDepend

After I released the first version of Disk Based Data Structures, a library for persisting collections on disk (Dictionary<>, List<>), I had the opportunity to try NDepend. As I worked towards a bugfixing/relfactoring release, I used NDepend on the code to clue me in to where I should focus my efforts.

If you haven’t used NDepend, it’s basically a tool which gives you a lot of metrics on your code base along with visual representations.

Code metrics can be scary at first, but once you understand what they tell you, they really help. For instance in the “Abstractness vs. Instability” chart my assemblies are plotted on the green area down right. This is due to the fact that I don’t expose many interfaces at all. The library is a concrete implementation of already established interfaces. So it’s ok to be down in the right corner.

I’ve also changed the signature from public to internal/private for many classes which were only used internally, in order to provide a cleaner public interface. All provided by a metric:

WARN IF Count > 0 IN SELECT TOP 10 METHODS WHERE CouldBePrivate

My Serializer assembly have a very low relational cohesion, which actually went down from 1.28 to 1.25. And it’s expected since I added one more serializer to the project, and none of the serializers have anything to do with each other. But it makes more sense to bundle them up together than to have multiple assemblies.

The most useful metrics for my refactor release was to identify long methods and the ones with circular complexity. This allowed me to break them up into more understandable code pieces. I try to write short code, but sometimes you forget. By using a metric tool it’s easy to find those pains and bring them up in the open, especially on old code. We all know our old code is worse than what we write today ;)

Another interesting fact is that while my code grew 40% in line size, my comments coverage increased with 2%. So during the refactoring process I wrote more comments. Not only did I break up the code, I documented it as well.

NDepend has it’s own query language so you can easily create your own code insights, or you can modify the existing ones.

All in all, I’m glad I stumbled over NDepend, and it’s become as natural an addition as R#, and I will most likely include it in the automatic build process in future projects.