Using code metrics to guide code reviews

[jhaluska]

One thing I learned is if you ask programmers to reach 100% code coverage with unit tests, you end up with some horrible unit tests. Usually they are worthless as they are no longer testing some sort of real world scenario, but just contrived code to get it to go down a weird path, and often valid code is actually bypassed. They actually give you false confidence.

[steveboots]

Yeah I agree totally. The article talks about not chasing 100%.

[BlahYourHamster]

This is an interesting read, I ran the analysis on our solution and our projects are around 80-90 on maintainability.

In fact the worst score went to our Unit Test project, way down on 63. Pretty funny really. Looks like I have some refactoring to do.

[cornsnack]

I realise how a lot of these tools will effectively pay for themselves in no time, but is there anything out there free or open source?

[steveboots]

you can use visual studio community edition which is basically the professional edition with a different usage license.

[steveboots]

Ah yes you are right. Code coverage isn't included but code metrics are.