Visual Basic —

Size Matters: The Metrics Sourcerer

Take any production system and log all the bugs it produces over a year or so. Then note which individual procedures are responsible for the majority of the defects. It's common for only 10 to 20 percent of a system's procedures to be responsible for 80 percent of the errors. If you examine the characteristics of these offending procedures, they will usually be more complex or longer (and sometimes both!) than their better-behaved counterparts. Keeping in mind that the earlier in the development cycle that these defects are detected the less costly it is to diagnose and fix them, any tool that helps to predict a system's problem areas before the system goes into production could prove to be very cost-effective. Step forward the Metrics Sourcerer. (See Figure 6-3.) This Visual Basic 6 add-in analyzes part or all of your project, ranking each procedure in terms of its relative complexity and length.

Figure 6-3 The Metrics Sourcerer dialog box

Defining complexity can be fairly controversial. Developers tend to have different ideas about what constitutes a complex procedure. Factors such as the difficulty of the algorithm or the obscurity of the Visual Basic keywords being employed can be considered useful to measure. The Metrics Sourcerer measures two rather more simple factors: the number of decision points and the number of lines of code that each procedure contains. Some evidence suggests that these are indeed useful characteristics to measure when you're looking for code routines that are likely to cause problems in the future. The number of decision points is easy to count. Certain Visual Basic 6 keywords-for example, If…Else…End If and Select Case-change the flow of a procedure, making decisions about which code to execute. The Metrics Sourcerer contains an amendable list of these keywords that it uses to count decision points. It then combines this number with the number of code lines that the procedure contains, employing a user-amendable weighting to balance the relative importance of these factors. The final analysis is then output to a text file, viewable by utilities such as WordPad and Microsoft Word. (By default, the filename is the name of your project with the extension MET.) You might also want to import the text file into Microsoft Excel for sorting purposes. There's no point in taking the output of the Metrics Sourcerer as gospel, but it would certainly be worthwhile to reexamine potentially dangerous procedures in the light of its findings.

Another factor that might be useful to measure is the number of assertion failures that each procedure in your program suffers from. This figure can be captured using the Assertion Sourcerer. Combining this figure with the numbers produced by the Metrics Sourcerer would be a very powerful pointer toward procedures that need more work before your system goes into production.

Some final thoughts Use the Metrics Sourcerer as a guide to the procedures in your programs that need to be examined with the aim of reducing their complexity. Economical to execute in terms of time, the Metrics Sourcerer can prove to be extremely effective in reducing the number of bugs that reach production.