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Static Analysis, NDepend, and a Pluralsight Course

I absolutely love statistics. Not statistics as in the school subject — I don’t particularly love that branch of mathematics with its binomial distributions and standard deviations and whatnot. I once remarked to a friend in college that statistics-the-subject seemed like the ‘science’ of taking a guess and then rigorously figuring out how wrong you were. Flippant as that assessment may have been, statistics-the subject has hardly the elegant smoothness of calculus or the relentlessly logical pursuit of discrete math. Not that it isn’t interesting at all — to a math geek like me, it’s all good — but it just isn’t really tops on my list.

But what is fascinating to me is tabulating outcomes and gamification. I love watching various sporting events on television and keep track of odd things. When watching a basketball game, I always the amount of a “run” the teams are on before the announcers think to say something like “Chicago is on a 15-4 run over the last 6:33 this quarter.” I could have told you that. In football, if the quarterback is approaching a fist half passing record, I’m calculating the tally mentally after every play and keeping track. Heck, I regularly watch poker on television not because of the scintillating personalities at the tables but because I just like seeing what cards come out, what hands win, and whether the game is statistically normal or aberrant. This extends all the way back to my childhood when things like my standardized test scores and my class rank were dramatically altered by me learning that someone was keeping score and ranking them.

I’m not sure what it is that drives this personality quirk of mine, but you can imagine what happened some years back when I discovered static analysis and then NDepend. I was hooked. Before I understood what the Henderson Sellers Lack of Cohesion in Methods score was, I knew that I wanted mine to be lower than other people’s. For those of you not familiar, static analysis is a way to examine your code without actually executing it and seeing what happens retroactively. Static analysis, (over) simplified, is an activity that examines your source code and makes educated guesses about how it will behave at runtime and beyond (i.e. maintenance). NDepend is a tool that performs static analysis at a level and with an amount of detail that makes it, in my opinion, the best game in town.

After overcoming an initial pointless gamification impulse, I learned to harness it instead. I read up on every metric under the sun and started to understand what high and low scores correlated with in code bases. In other words, I studied properties of good code bases and bad code bases, as described by these metrics, and started to rely on my own extreme gamification tendencies in order to drive my work toward better code. It wasn’t just a matter of getting in the habit of limiting my methods to the absolute minimum in size or really thinking through the coupling in my code base. I started to learn when optimizing to improve one metric led to a decline in another — I learned lessons about design tradeoffs.

It was this behavior of seeking to prove myself via objective metrics that got me started, but it was the ability to ask and answer lots of questions about my code base that kept me coming back. I think that this is the real difference maker when it comes NDepend, at least for me. I can ask questions, and then I can visualize, chart and track the answer in just about every conceivable way. I have a “Moneyball” approach to code, and NDepend is like my version of the Jonah Hill character in that movie.

Because of my high opinion of this tool and its importance in the lives of developers, I made a Pluralsight course about it. If you have a subscription and have any interest in this subject at all, I invite you to check it out. If you’re not familiar with the subject, I’d say that if your interest in programming breaks toward architecture — if you’re an architect or an aspiring architect — you should also check it out. Static analysis will give you a huge leg up on your competition for architect roles, and my course will provide an introduction for getting started. If you don’t have a Pluralsight subscription, I highly recommend trying one out and/or getting one. This isn’t just a plug for me to sell a course I’ve made, either. I was a Pluralsight subscriber and fan before I ever became an author.

If you get a chance to check it out, I hope you enjoy.