From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Path: border1.nntp.dca3.giganews.com!backlog3.nntp.dca3.giganews.com!border3.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!news.glorb.com!feeder.erje.net!us.feeder.erje.net!newsfeed.fsmpi.rwth-aachen.de!reality.xs3.de!news.jacob-sparre.dk!loke.jacob-sparre.dk!pnx.dk!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Jacob Sparre Andersen Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ada in Denmark: Birthday of Ada - Talk on cyclomatic complexity Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2013 12:32:47 +0100 Organization: Jacob Sparre Andersen Research & Innovation Message-ID: <87zjo7r5b4.fsf@adaheads.sparre-andersen.dk> References: <87r49lhwh2.fsf@adaheads.sparre-andersen.dk> NNTP-Posting-Host: fw2.nbi.dk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: loke.gir.dk 1386761567 7091 130.225.212.4 (11 Dec 2013 11:32:47 GMT) X-Complaints-To: news@jacob-sparre.dk NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2013 11:32:47 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.4 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:goeQMEWKpabvDa08crYA7G/5NZw= X-Original-Bytes: 3170 Xref: number.nntp.dca.giganews.com comp.lang.ada:184179 Date: 2013-12-11T12:32:47+01:00 List-Id: A short report from the Ada in Denmark meeting yesterday: We started the evening with Thomas Pedersen's presentation of the principles in McCabe's cyclomatic complexity measure. Following up on the presentation we discussed the experimental evidence available to identify which (cyclomatic) complexities are acceptable. Per Dalgas was kind enough to provide a "problematic" legacy subprogram in Ada which we found to have a cyclomatic complexity of 9. McCabe himself indicates 10 as an upper limit and references some provided examples of problematic subprograms with complexities of 16 and above (IIRC). I have done a search for Ada subprograms with complexity above 10 in my published Ada projects. All the examples I have found so far were straight transcriptions from old FORTRAN sources. The discussion continued on the subject of measuring source text quality. Per Dalgas posed the challenge of how we get more software developers to _use_ the available metrics. One option which came up was to run quality metrics automatically on the source texts on public version control repository services (such as Bitbucket, Github and Sourceforge). This has the benefit of being something which initially can be implemented as an independent service and only later be pushed to the actual source hosting services (if they want it). But would implementing such a measure make a difference? Will the developers worry about it? Will the users of software use it as a selection criteria if they get the possibility? Then SQALE came up as an example of a "combined" source text quality measure (I had the pleasure of attending Jean-Pierre Rosen's talk on SQALE at Ada Europe 2011), but it appears that only few tools exist (and none of them Open Source) and it wasn't obvious which languages the tools can analyse. In another branch of the discussion we wondered if we could get big buyers/tenderers of software to require SQALE measures with constraints on what is acceptable levels as a part of software delivery contracts. Greetings, Jacob -- "Very small. Go to sleep" - monster (not drooling)