Architecture/Source Code Inventory

Owner: Kay Ramme, Stefan Zimmermann Type: analysis State: draft

I was asked to step in and to partly take care of our (OOo) source code, basically by doing an inventory. Typically an inventory is about counting what you have, to see what has been sold or stolen etc. As source code typically can not be sold or stolen (at least not as a thing), I spend some thoughts on interpreting and extending what kind of inventory we need.

First things I would like to do are,

• google around, see if I can find something related,
• briefly summarize what I think we actually want, coming up with the following,
  • easy to understand (low barrier of entrance) source code,
  • ideally no redundancy in the code base,
  • clear missions for particular projects / modules / files etc.,
  • low dependencies amongst projects / modules / files etc.,
  • no unused code.

Ideally, the things to be analyzed in the inventory can be measured, so that doing measurements before and after a change "effort", shows an actual improvement.

Links

• Wikipedia gives a good introduction to software metrics, pros / cons and approaches.
• Thorsten was so kind creating a page with various (source) code tools, including tools generating metrics etc. See Other Tools.
• Official OOo statistics - http://stats.openoffice.org
• Wikipedia about wikipedia:Software_maintenance.

To be continued ...