Influence the future of NDepend

Posted by Patrick Smacchia on September 14, 2009

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You face the
difficult task of keeping your code base in a clean state. Like many
others, you use well accepted techniques such as metrics, componentization, dependency
management, automatic rules checking… If
you are a user of NDepend, you know that tools that enforce code
quality can help you in your daily tasks.
At NDepend, we work hard to bring you the best tool to enforce high .NET code quality standard. NDepend is the result of several years of innovation, of hard
work, and most important: of listening to you. All the remarks posted to our support and in this blog have
been carefully taken into consideration, and most of them already
influenced the development of NDepend. Integration with Reflector, interactive Dependency Graph or Build Comparison were requested by the community.
We set up an online questionnaire to
collect your suggestions concerning the next releases of NDepend, and
your thoughts concerning the current one. Answering this questionnaire
is simple and fast: a few simple questions, no sign up required, no
need to leave your email address. Simple and fast.
Let us be clear: this WILL influence the future of NDepend.

 

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  • http://tormodjs.blogspot.com Tormod

    First of all: NDepend is a great product.
    And I hope it keeps getting better.

    Sometimes, though, I feel that I need to “reach over” to get at something. A feature that I have been missing is the opportunity to add relevant columns in the dependency matrix. If the current set of row has dependencies to a hidden set of columns, I would like to add all of the “non-empty” columns with a press of a button. This would also serve as an assurance that I, before pressing “print”, haven’t inadvertantly hidden anything important.

    I would also be interested in seeing refactoring cases. What symptoms do you have that a certain refactoring is needed? How do they show up in metrix?

    But the main part is to manage dependencies. To learn that the wrong thing is impacted from an irrelevant change.
    To manage a code base and say “this is the area where change SHOULD be directed”. And “due to this detail, all this stuff is suddenly sitting downstream”.

    NDepend should also be highly accessible to the CI process. Any prepared view should have a URL or something so that it is possible to create an automated rendering of it from the commandline.

    //MetricsView/BuildDiff:PreviousCIBuild/Filter:TestCoverage_WasAdded_ExcludingGUIandDBLayer/

    …Or something so that I would see the MetricsView on the department continuous integration homepage. And that QA department could get this diff on major releases as part of their input to decide need for testing.

  • http://codebetter.com/members/Patrick-Smacchia/default.aspx Patrick Smacchia

    Tormod, thanks for your feedbacks, it is highly appreciated.

    Concerning dependencies management, next releases will indeed comes with more facilities.

    So far, NDepend philosophy is to provide a tool to let user collect all kind of relevant data (metrics, dependencies, evolutions…) and also write rules. One of our long term plan is to inject some ‘intelligence’ into the tool, that will let it emit some relevant and valuable advices and caveats. I cannot communicate too much on this, but this is definitely part of our future plans.