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Software development is a complicated discipline, especially when you consider that it is performed by several people working together.
Comparing it to emergent systems is useful because it provides a perspective where we can think of software as something that evolves.
Being able to measure that evolution is then crucial if we want to be able to tell if the product we are building is holding up in terms of quality.
I also describe a tool named NDepend that serves exactly this purpose (and as far as I know has no competitors). It provides extensive metrics and allows for the creation of custom rules, all of this while supporting integration with a continuous integration workflow.
Source: https://www.blinkingcaret.com/2018/08/22/software-development-emergent-system-ndepend/
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 27 2018, @06:47AM (1 child)
Assuming it's true, your product is either revolutionary or it has no competitors because nobody wants it. Look. I built an office chair that's guaranteed to make you fall over backwards. Nobody else makes them. It "has no competitors".
Alternatively, and more commonly, such statements are lies from marketing. Skimming over TFA that seems to be the case. It's code metrics. We've got that. We can already script it. We can do it in a lot of environments.
(Score: 2) by mth on Monday August 27 2018, @08:33AM
Yeah, nothing in the article sounds particularly new. Code metrics have been around for ages, several tools support custom rules (*), the idea of a compound score isn't new either. What I hadn't seen before is visualizing the score in treemaps: that looks useful but it's hardly a revolution.
(*) A feature that barely anyone uses, in my observation: I don't recall seeing custom rules used in projects I've come across. I've written my own custom rules using PMD and PyLint, but at a rate of less than one a year. I tend to only use it to find violations of project-specific coding rules that are easy to make and hard to spot, like a library class/function that must be used in a specific way. You're better off avoiding the need for such rules in the first place and programming languages have more constructs now that allow you to design APIs that are not so fragile.