Comments on: How toxic is your code?

By: Metrics based Refactoring for cleaner code

Metrics based Refactoring for cleaner code — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 19:53:00 +0000

[...] Toxicity charts have proved very useful in quantifying the amount of technical debt in a code-base. The magnitude of the debt is quantified by comparing a value against an arbitrary threshold. The toxicity is expressed as a score against the threshold. [...]

By: Srivatsa Katta

Srivatsa Katta — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 05:23:16 +0000

Excellent post, we wanted to calculate toxicity on every checkin and monitor how we are improving the legacy code base. The excel sheet import needed some manual effort, so I wrote a small java utility which runs based on the checkstyle report and generates the toxicity (for all the important checks mentioned in this post).

Yes the report generated is just numbers doesn’t have fancy visual representation of toxicity using graphs and all, but serves the purpose of hooking it up to the continuous integration tool.

More details : https://github.com/katta/toxicity

Thanks Erik again for this post which helped me understand how toxicity is calculated.

By: How Toxic is your Code? | OnTechnicalDebt | The Premiere Technical Debt Online Community

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 22:25:06 +0000

[...] Erik Bornenburg has an excellent post on his blog about how you can visualize your code and understand which part of it is part, compared to the rest of the code. This can be extremely useful in helping managers and non-developers understand the internal quality of the code. This post shows us how Toxicity Charts can help you see the technical debt that has been built up in your software: http://erik.doernenburg.com/2008/11/how-toxic-is-your-code/ [...]

By: My Testing and Code Analysis Toolbox | The Agile Radar

My Testing and Code Analysis Toolbox | The Agile Radar — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 09:13:12 +0000

[...] CheckStyle: A static code analysis that finds lots of bad practices and can check lots of coding conventions too. Integrates in IDEs and CI server. There are other tools in this area which are worth considering: FindBugs and PMD. You can also use Checkstyle in order to gather simple metrics about your code. [...]

By: Schauderhaft » My Testing and Code Analysis Toolbox

Schauderhaft » My Testing and Code Analysis Toolbox — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 06:42:02 +0000

By: What am I thinking about? Visualising your technical debt « On The Job Alliance

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 11:23:10 +0000

[...] find out more about these visualisation methods check out Erik’s blog article and his excellent presentation of Software Quality – you know it when you see [...]

By: Erik Doernenburg

Erik Doernenburg — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 15:44:14 +0000

Danny, what “stack size” are you referring to? That article doesn’t mention it.

By: Danny Arica

Danny Arica — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 16:13:26 +0000

What does “stack size” mean?

By: Digital Dim Sum » Blog Archive » Dealing with creaky legacy platforms

Digital Dim Sum » Blog Archive » Dealing with creaky legacy platforms — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 20:11:02 +0000

[...] Toxicity, another aggregated metric, has been playing a prominent role in our “system health checks” at ThoughtWorks. Toxicity charts stack multiple static analysis metrics for classes, methods, or components within an application, providing a combined “toxicity” score for each area of the code base (see Figure 2). This gives our clients guidance on where to start looking to fix problems. [...]

By: Ian Cartwright

Ian Cartwright — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:34:44 +0000

Noticed a problem with Integer overflows for very large values of NPath complexity, the CheckStyle team fixed the same overflow issue themselves a while back.

The fix is pretty simple, just need to change the declaration for ‘values’ from Integer to Long. See below

Function CalculateScore(n As String) As Variant
If (n = “score”) Then
CalculateScore = n
Else
Dim values(0 To 2) As Long
values(0) = -1
values(1) = -1