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My company recently purchased TFS and I have started looking into the code analysis tools to help drive up code quality and noticed a good looking metric "maintainability index". Is anyone using this metric for code reviews/checkins/etc? If so, what is an acceptable index for developers to work toward?
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Maintainability Index is a software metric which measures how maintainable (easy to support and change) the source code is. The maintainability index is calculated as a factored formula consisting of SLOC (Source Lines Of Code), Cyclomatic Complexity and Halstead volume.
When investigating the maintainability of your code base, make sure to examine the number of code anomalies per thousand lines of code, i.e. the Findings Density. This gives you a measure for how often developers are confronted and hindered by code anomalies.
The Code Analysis feature of Visual Studio performs static code analysis to help developers identify potential design, globalization, interoperability, performance, security, and a host of other categories of potential problems.
Basically, class coupling is a measure of how many classes a single class uses. A high number is bad and a low number is usually good with this metric. Class coupling has been shown to be an accurate predictor of software failure and recent studies have shown that an upper-limit value of 9 is the most efficient S2010.
The maintainability index is not as much a fixed value you look at, it's more of an indication that code is hard to understand, test and/or debug. I usually try to keep high-level code (basically anything except for the real plumbing code) above 80, where 90+ would be good. It adds a competitive element to programming as maintainable as possible to me.
The code analysis tool really shines in the area of dependencies and the number of branches within a method though. More branches mean harder testing, which makes it more error-prone. Dependencies, same thing.
In other people's code, I use the maintainability index to spot possible bad parts in the code, so I know where to review it. Also, methods/classes with a high number of lines are an indication of poor code to me (unless it can't be avoided, again, the plumbing works).
In the end, I think it mainly depends on how often your code will change. Code that's expected to change a lot has to score higher in maintainability than your typical 'write once' code.
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