What code metric(s) convince you that provided cod

Question

Code lines per file, methods per class, cyclomatic complexity and so on. Developers resist and workaround most if not all of them! There is a good Joel article on it (no time to find it now).

What code metric(s) you recommend for use to automatically identify "crappy code"?

What can convince most (you can't convince all of us to some crappy metric! :O) ) of developers that this code is "crap".

Only metrics that can be automatically measured counts!

Answer 1

This hilarious blog post on The Code C.R.A.P Metric could be useful.

Answer 2

I don't believe there is any such metric. With the exception of code that actually doesn't do what it's supposed to (which is a whole extra level of crappiness) 'crappy' code means code that is hard to maintain. That usually means it's hard for the maintainer to understand, which is always to some extent a subjective thing, just like bad writing. Of course there are cases where everyone agrees the writing (or the code) is crappy, but it's very hard to write a metric for it.

Plus everything is relative. Code doing a highly complex function, in minimal memory, optimized for every last cycle of speed, will look very bad compared with a simple function under no restrictions. But it's not crappy - it's just doing what it has to.

Answer 3

I take a multi-tiered approach with the first tier being reasonable readability offset only by the complexity of the problem being solved. If it can't pass the readability test I usually consider the code less than good.