On Thursday, July 26, 2012 01:10:50 PM Matt Wagner wrote:
On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 05:29:24PM +0200, Petr Blaho wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I would like to know your opinions regarding code metrics service
> for Ruby applications -
https://codeclimate.com .
<snip>
> What I want to ask you is whether you can see benefit of using it for Aeolus Project
(not only for Conductor)
> or if you percieve this service only as a little toy.
I think this looks pretty nifty, and I don't see any downside to trying
it out, though I'm not crazy about the idea of it sending emails to the
list. (Just because there's already a ton of noise.)
I just tested that after change in code no email comes.
(Change already on codeclimate.)
I can subscribe to atom feed if I want.
I do think it's important that we take automated metrics as vague rules
of thumb, versus hard scientific facts. If complexity goes way up, or
readability goes way down, we should investigate. But if you extend a
basic file to have it do some more complex tasks, and the complexity
goes up a little, I don't think we should be alarmed.
You are right. I think this tool can only provide hint what can be problem.
I went to a talk Chad Fowler gave a while back, and he talked about a
lot of this stuff. One of the more interesting projects to me was his
own turbulence gem:
https://github.com/chad/turbulence
The notion is to graph churn vs. complexity. I had a hard time getting
it to work on Conductor and ended up forgetting about it. But he pointed
out that there are instances of complex, unmaintainable code that "just
work" and go years without needing anyone to touch them. What's really
dangerous is high-complexity code that gets modified all the time.
I agree that often changed code (class, file) is probably not well designed and coded
when it has huge complexity too.
I liked churn and I will look at turbulence.
-- Matt
Thanks for your input...
--
With regards
Petr Blaho