Do software metrics work both ways

Question

I just started working for a large company. in a recent internal audit, measuring metrics such as Cyclomatic complexity and file sizes it turned out that several modules including the one owned by my team have a very high index. so in the last week we have been all concentrating on lowering these indexes for our code. by removing decision points and splitting files.

maybe I am missing something being the new guy but, how will this make our software better?, I know that software metrics can measure how good your code is, but dose it work the other way around? will our code become better just because for example we are making a 10000 lines file into 4 2500 lines files?

Answer 1

The purpose of metrics is to have more control over your project. They are not a goal on their own, but can help to increase the overall quality and/or to spot design disharmonies. Cyclomatic complexity is just one of them.

Test coverage is another one. It is however well-known that you can get high test coverage and still have a poor test suite, or the opposite, a great test suite that focus on one part of the code. The same happens for cyclomatic complexity. Consider the context of each metrics, and whether there is something to improve.

You should try to avoid accidental complexity, but if the processing has essential complexity, you code will anyway be more complicated. Try then to write mainteanble code with a fair balance between the number of methods and their size.

A great book to look at is "Object-oriented metrics in practice".