What code metric(s) convince you that provided code is “crappy”? [closed]

Answer 1

Well, there are various different ways you could use to point out whether or not a code is a good code. Following are some of those:

1. Cohesiveness: Well, the block of code, whether class or a method, if found to be serving multiple functionality, then the code can be found to be lower in cohesiveness. The code lower in cohesiveness can be termed as low in re-usability. This can further be termed as code lower in maintainability.

   1. Code complexity: One can use McCabe cyclomatic complexity (no. of decision points) to determine the code complexity. The code complexity being high can be used to represent code with less usability (difficult to read & understand).

   2. Documentation: Code with not enough document can also attribute to low software quality from the perspective of usability of the code.

Check out following page to read about checklist for code review.

Answer 2

• Non-existent tests (revealed by code coverage). It's not necessarily an indicator that the code is bad, but it's a big warning sign.

• Profanity in comments.

Answer 3

Unfortunately there is not a metric that I know of. Something to keep in mind is no matter what you choose the programmers will game the system to make their code look good. I have seen that everywhere any kind of "automatic" metric is put into place.

Answer 4

Number of warnings the compiler spits out when I do a build.

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

Number of commented out lines per line of production code. Generally it indicates a sloppy programmer that doesn't understand version control.