"Good" Flay Score

Question

I'm working on a rails project and we're running Flay on it. Its got a score of ~1400 and I'm unsure what this really means. I know that 0 is ideal but I'm unsure what a good target would be and what a realistic upper-bound for a project should be. Is there any good documentation on the scoring process and what the end-result is?

Answer 1

Here is a link regarding Flog's scoring process and how to refactor your project to reduce its score. (I figure since Flay is similar to Flog the scoring process should be similar)

Scoring your Rail Application's Complexity

Here is another, albeit older link (2008) with a discussion on Flog's scoring system:

Jake Scruggs - What's a good Flog Score?

You can also take a look at Caliper, which is another Ruby metrics tool.

Hope these helped!

Answer 2

There's a simple solution to this dilemma, which applies not only to Flay, but pretty much all "badness" scores: set the upper-bound to whatever the current score is, and whenever it decreases, set it to the new value.

That way, you guarantee

1. that your goal is realistic (because it will already be fulfilled) and
2. that you only ever improve, or in the worst case stagnate, but you never get worse.