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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.
Any tool is only good if it is in the hands of a developer who knows how to use it. NDepend is one of those tools which is very powerful but addresses an aspect of software development too few architects or developers understand, software metrics.
Enerjy studied tens of thousands of source code files and found the optimum Cyclomatic Complexity number is 11, with a 28% defect probability. In fact, you are more likely to encounter a defect if you have lower complexity - is it time to make your methods are more complicated?
PartCover is beginning to fill the void left by NCover. Both SharpDevelop and TreeSurgeon have integrated PartCover to provide code coverage.
A blog post titled "Debugger Support Considered Harmful" claims that Ruby debugging support is lacking - and that that's a good thing. We look at the various rebuttals and the state of Ruby debuggers.
Ruby gains another tool to ensure code quality: dcov analyses Ruby code and determines the documentation coverage. We caught up with dcov developer Jeremy McAnally to talk about his plans.
How much testing is enough? The answer varies depending on whom you ask. On one end of the spectrum, some say you should strive to achieve 100% test coverage. Others say it doesn't matter, that you should just rely on the quality of the tests, and that measuring test coverage does not tell you anything about the quality of the tests and the code being tested.
Like Jester, the Java program that inspired it, Heckle mutates your Ruby code, attempting to make your unit tests fail. The premise is simple: If your unit test doesn't choke on Heckle's mutated code, then you need to improve coverage.
