NDepend

Clean Code

Most of the static analysis tool in the .Net world report isolated code metrics. While this is useful, I would like to be able to detect coarse grained code smells. Being able to correlate several metrics to identify design disharmonies allows you to treat a problem holistically. In this blog post we’ll see how we can use NDepend to detect potential God Classes.

God Class Detection Strategy

A God Class is a class that centralizes the intelligence in the system. It is large, complex, has low cohesion and uses data from other classes. Object-Oriented Metrics in Practice, by Michele Lanza and Radu Marinescu, proposes the following detection strategy for a God Class:

(ATFD > Few) AND (WMC >= Very High) AND (TCC < One Third)

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Quality

The Overview Pyramid describes and characterizes the structure of an object oriented system by looking at three main areas: size and complexity, coupling and inheritance. This visualization technique has been defined by Radu Marinescu and Michele Lanza in their book Object-Oriented Metrics in Practice. In this blog post we’ll see how to compute all the necessary metrics by using NDepend.

The Overview Pyramid

Example Overview Pyramid
source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Overview_pyramid.jpg

The purpose of the Overview Pyramid is to provide a high level overview of any object oriented system. It does this by putting in one place some of the most important measurements about a software system. The left part describes the Size and Complexity. The right part describes the System Coupling. The top part describes the inheritance usage.

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Quality

Lines of code, cyclomatic complexity, coupling, cohesion, code coverage. You’ve probably heard about these metrics before. But do you actively track them? Should you? Visual Studio computes some of these metrics out of the box. But if you want to define a custom metric, you’re out of luck. Yet, there are a bunch of code metrics that you might find useful for your code base. More so, a composite metric might be more helpful than the sum of its parts. For example, the C.R.A.P. Metric detects complex code that is not covered by unit tests. How can you track such a metric in Visual Studio? In this article we’ll see how to visualize code metrics, add custom metrics and how to monitor trends with NDepend.

Code Metrics

NDepend computes many metrics out of the box. You can use the intellisense support to discover the standard metrics for a given code element:

Computer Code Metrics

But it would be hard to extract information from these metrics if all we got was a bunch of numbers. We need other techniques to help us break down the complexity of the data. Visualization techniques complement metrics, by making it easier to synthesize and digest this information.

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Quality

Your code base has a lot to tell you. The question is: How can you listen to it? You can identify code smells when you’re reading code or extending it, but this doesn’t give you an overview. After you have been working for a while in a project, you can name some of its strengths and weaknesses. But this approach takes a long time, relies on experience and is subjective. It would be nice if you could query a code base in a structured way. Basic search functionality from an IDE like Visual Studio isn’t powerful enough. NDepend allows you to query .Net code using LINQ syntax through CQLinq – Code Query LINQ. In this blog post we’ll discuss how to query your code base using CQLinq.

An Example

Since I like to learn from examples, let’s first see a simple, yet very powerful query. The following code detects classes that are candidates to be turned into structures. This is one of the default CQLinq rules.

from t in JustMyCode.Types where
  t.IsClass &&
 !t.IsGeneratedByCompiler &&
 !t.IsStatic &&
  t.SizeOfInst > 0 &&

  // Structure instance must not be too big,
  // else it degrades performance.
  t.SizeOfInst <= 16 &&
  // Must not have children
  t.NbChildren == 0 &&

  // Must not implement interfaces to avoid boxing mismatch
  // when structures implements interfaces.
  t.InterfacesImplemented.Count() == 0 &&

  // Must derive directly from System.Object
  t.DepthOfDeriveFrom("System.Object".AllowNoMatch()) == 1 &&

  // Structures should be immutable type.
  t.IsImmutable
select new { t, t.SizeOfInst, t.InstanceFields }

As you can see, the query is quite readable. Even if you don’t know the CQLinq syntax, you understand what it does. And since it’s based on Linq, it already seems familiar.

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Clean Code, Quality

How do you manage dependencies in your project? Since an image speaks a thousand words, I’ve always been a fan of visual management. Unfortunately, Visual Studio Professional doesn’t provide a way to do this. In the Premium and Enterprise editions you can visualize code dependencies on dependency graphs. But I don’t think this is enough. An architectural diagram with every assembly or namespace in my solution doesn’t tell me that much. It contains too much information.

Fortunately, there is a tool that can help you manage dependencies in the .Net world: NDepend (there is also a Java port – JArchitect). NDepend is a static analysis tool that, among other things, allows you to visualize dependencies. After I first ran NDepend on a project, I was overwhelmed with information. Then I took some time to play around and discover what can it tell me about my solution. NDepend integrates into Visual Studio quite nicely and points you in the right direction through tool tips and links. This is useful for people who prefer learning by doing. Aside from giving you information, it also tells you what to do with that information.

NDepend has two main views for managing dependencies: the Dependency Graph and the Dependency Structure Matrix. Apart from these, there is also an Abstractness vs Instability report that can be helpful. In this blog post, we’ll discuss some of the things that these views can tell you about your solution.

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