In this article, author Olivier Gaudin discusses the differences between internal and external software quality and how to perform the software quality assessment using tools like Sonar and its new extension JaCoCo.
Patrick Smacchia is a Visual C# MVP with over 15 years of software development experience. He is the author of Practical .NET 2 and C# 2, books about the .NET platform. He has worked on software in a variety of fields including the stock exchange at Société Générale and a satellite base station at Alcatel. He's currently the lead developer of the tool NDepend.
Robert C. Martin, during his keynote at QCon London 2010, tried to figure out why there is so much bad code written. He offers advice on writing good code talking about a bad code example, Boy Scout rule, functions, arguments, craftsmanship, TDD, continuous integration, pairing, small cycles, patterns, engineering, certification, and other elements contributing to qualitative code.
False confidence is often grounded in wishful thinking. It is defined as a state where the projected reality and the actual reality might differ considerably, however for a limited period of time, it does give a feeling of having everything under control. There are many such situations in Agile development which make a team hold onto the false confidence crutch only to fall later.
Adobe has made available a prerelease of an ActionScript Code Coverage Plug-in for Flash Builder, which aims to help developers understand exactly what code is executed while an application is running. When added to Flash Builder, the plug-in provides a new Eclipse perspective that allows you to start the code coverage tool.
NDepend 3.0 comes integrated with Visual Studio analyzing code in real time, can analyze code over multiple VS solutions, supports editing of multiple CQL rules at one time, and comes with enhanced search and performance.
The recent release of Clover 2.4 highlights a new "Test Optimization" feature that offers to speed up CI builds and allow developers to spend less time waiting for their tests to run. The feature leverages "per-test" coverage data to selectively run only the tests impacted by your code changes.
Christian Gruber takes some time to clarify the TDD stance on using code coverage metrics. He discusses what code coverage metrics do and don't tell you, how TDD fits into the picture, and how one might be best advised to use their code coverage metrics.
Coverity recently released Readiness Manager for Java providing a dashboard and analysis for code complexity, violation of best practices, architectural integrity, interdependencies, and test coverage.
