Code City

Today I was reading a book about software metrics called "Object-Oriented Metrics in Practice" by Michele Lanza and Radu Marinescu. It's abouth things like "Design Harmony" and so on.

Some of the ideas are debatable, for example on page 46 they say:

...you cannot understand the beauty of a painting by measuring its frame or understand the depth of a poem by counting the lines...

...metrics can help to evaluate and improve designs, but those have to be meaningful metrics that are put in a context of design harmony...

But at the same time it's obvious that you won't see the beauty of the poem looking on it's grammar, syntax or verse structure (these are more-or-less analogues for software design metrics), without actually reading and understanding the sense. That's why my conclusion is that for creating a harmonious software design it's necessary (but not sufficient) for the metrics to be harmonious, too.

What I liked most of all was the concept of visualizing software projects as cities. The metaphor includes classes as buildings and packages as districts. It is implemented in a tool called CodeCity. Some results of its work can be seen on Richard Wettel's page, who actually wrote it. Here is just one of them:



Though, there are few things which I think can make it even better:

• It would be great to see a color scheme based on the developers responsible for changes, for example, using svn blame (it can be useful for both "normal" and "timeline" views).
• Building base should be Sqrt(NOA), not just NOA - it will look more realistic. It also should have an option to scale building height to Log(NOM).
• Color scheme should be configurable - for example, it's hard to see some "outdated" buildings on the dark backgrounds.

Nevertheless, thank you very much for giving really interesting food for my mind :)

TeamCity by JetBrains: yet another great CI solution

After some excitement about Rational Team Concert features, here comes another one about TeamCity, by JetBrains, the same company which gave us IntelliJ IDEA and ReShaper.

So, TeamCity is an all-included solution supporting tons of really advanced features, among which there are:

• Remote Run and Pre-tested commit
• Build Grid (just awesome!)
• Code Coverage, Inspections and Duplicates Search
• Build Progress and Estimation
• Notifications (of all kinds)

You can try and actually use it for free until your project is huge enough. It takes just 225 Mb to download and 3 minutes to install.

Nice short article about IBM Rational Team Concert

Here it is. Seems that RTC is even better than I thought... Among cool things mentioned, there are:

• Support for Agile methodology out of the box
• Original approach to SCM, based on the concept of "streams" (which are essentially branches)
• Advanced build system, automatically collecting all supporting artifacts, such as change sets, fixed defects, etc.
• A lot of great documentation (like Getting Started with Jazz Source Control)
  

What I can add from my personal experience, is that the Major Huge Advantage of RTC is that you get all these features integrated altogether out of the box. Installed it today on Windows 2003 Server - it took just 15 minutes (!) to install and configure a complete team collaboration solution. It normally takes few days to configure something like Trac + Subversion + Hudson, and even longer if you'd like to replace Trac with Redmine or Bugzilla on Linux, etc.

Complete stack of Redmine

When installing Redmine (which seems to be a nice alternative to Trac), I found a site where you can download complete stacks of different open source software, like LAMP, Trac, etc. Should be very useful when one needs a basic fast installation. Versions there are more-or-less fresh (i. e. 0.10.4 for Trac and 0.8.1 for Redmine).