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I'm working on a quite large project, a few years in the making, at a pretty large company, and I'm taking on the task of driving toward better overall code quality.
I was wondering what kind of metrics you would use to measure quality and complexity in this context. I'm not looking for absolute measures, but a series of items which could be improved over time. Given that this is a bit of a macro-operation across hundreds of projects (I've seen some questions asked about much smaller projects), I'm looking for something more automatable and holistic.
So far, I have a list that looks like this:
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You can measure your code's quality by reviewing its testability, which shows how well the code, program or software can support any testing efforts conducted on it. You may measure the code's testability by running tests on the code to see how many tests it takes to identify errors or faults present in the code.
It is important and best to analyze code when it's written and before the code review. This helps save a lot of time and makes the process of resolving errors cheaper and easier. Code review is one of the top three ways to ensure code quality.
Quantitative Code Quality Metrics WMFP automatically measures the complexity of existing source code. The metrics used to determine the WMFP value include comments, code structure, arithmetic calculations, and flow control path.
You should organize your work around the six major software quality characteristics: functionality, reliability, usability, efficiency, maintainability, and portability. I've put a diagram online that describes these characteristics. Then, for each characteristic decide the most important metrics you want and are able to track. For example, some metrics, like those of Chidamber and Kemerer are suitable for object-oriented software, others, like cyclomatic complexity are more general-purpose.
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Cyclomatic complexity is a decent "quality" metric. I'm sure developers could find a way to "game" it if it were the only metric, though! :)
And then there's the C.R.A.P. metric...
P.S. NDepend has about ten billion metrics, so that might be worth looking at. See also CodeMetrics for Reflector.
D'oh! I just noticed that you already mentioned NDepend.
Number of reported bugs would be interesting to track, too...
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