Background:
Software quality is not limited to testing for strong
validations, security and vulnerabilities but also depends upon its
architecture, coding standards, and defined business logics.
Quality assurance (QA) generally does by separate quality
team in software industries and qualifies it after validations, security,
vulnerabilities and performance testing. Testers do not have any idea about
coding standards and business structures used behind the scene. Now the
question arises, if coding guidelines and business structure are not defined
properly then does the software will be really a quality product?
Object oriented (OO) concepts are not a piece of cake.
Understanding, coding and managing software program in object oriented paradigm
(OOPs) is really a big challenge in software development.
Consider you are the lead of a project and numbers of programmers are programming. Your assigned project is really big, then how you will assure about its quality in terms of coding standard, unless you do not have thorough knowledge about written codes? Second thing, is it an easy task for you to review entire project code lines and to decide whether the implemented concepts are write or wrong? Where the programmers have violated the rules? What could be the best approach? To find the variables defined but never been used? What are the dead codes? Rules violated, project dependencies, third party DLL(s) used in it? Not limited to these only, but numerous of similar challenges comes while handling large projects, because you can never assume all the programmers have same understandings.
Before, to overcome these problems, you need to do hard work
to review and find all code logic written in assemblies or in project scope.
But now a day’s tools are available in market those can really make your task
easy and accurate.
NDepend: Your project review partner.
One of the tools I discovered is NDepend. This tool finds
all the dependencies, assemblies used in project, reviews the code lines, classes
& OOPs methodologies implemented and finally gives you a visual report from
where you can easily monitor and track the limitations as well rules violated
in your class libraries. Nevertheless, it has a user friendly dashboard which
shows graphical representations of entire code activities, dependencies, code
rules, rules violated, types, percentage of comment lines, third party tools
used and similar.