The last couple of weeks I've been spending a little effort on getting some code metrics up and running. I've blogged about measuring in software development before , and I think code is definitely one of the easiest and most important things to measure. The most important thing about metrics is that you monitor them . I am of the firm belief that if you run a static code-analysis report manually, it will give you very little. Your team will say "wow, we have 3000 FindBugs warnings", fix a couple of them, and then forget about it. Then the next time you run the report, you'll find new bugs that have crept in, with no idea of when or who did it. There are two ways to track these kind of metrics: IDE warnings Continuous integration reports IDE warnings Most of you have probably enabled the built-in warning system inside Eclipse (unused method, potential null-pointer, etc). Some of you strive to minimize these numbers of warnings, some of you have perhaps even turned
My thoughts on software development.