Code Analysis and Code Metrics - Orcas Team Developer & Suite

Building quality in ! - The next release of Visual Studio Team developer has some very nice features for those 'true practitioners of software quality' in the form of Code Analysis and Code metrics.

I say 'true practitioners of software quality' because there is a whole community out there who believe in Deming’s first principals of quality and the one in particular that talks about the need to 'build in quality' rather than simply measure quality by 'testing after the event' and then, by implication, learn from your mistakes via a process of 'continuous improvement'. Its a fair enough argument too - anyone who has written a lot of code knows that it is far easier to test well written code as opposed to badly written - the key reasons being that well written code not only makes it easier to find 'bugs' after testing but also tends to have fewer bugs anyway.

Now it can be argued that competent developers write well written code and that those same competent developers also produce far fewer bugs because they are competent. I beg to differ at times - over thirty years in IT I have seen some appalling code come through bug free and some 'exquisite' examples of the art of coding coming out riddled with bugs. Fact is that code analysis is another tool in the 'software code quality' arsenal that can, if used correctly save a lot of grief later either in the current or later iterations of the Application Life cycle(s) that are leveraging a particular piece of code or an entire code base.

Here is a link to the Visual Studio Code Analysis Team blog that goes into these powerful new features comping to Team Developer.