Posts

Showing posts from April, 2008

Dead Simple Rails Metrics with metric_fu

Image
Every time I create a new rails project I usually put off writing tasks to analyze the code's quality 'cause it takes time and time is, you know, finite. So I've decided to extract some code into a rails plugin which I call metric_fu. It's a bunch of rake tasks that produce reports on code coverage (using Rcov ), cyclomatic complexity (using Saikuro ), flog scores (using Flog ), and rails stats (using 'rake stats'). It knows if it's being run inside a CruiseControl.rb build and puts the output in the Custom Build Artifacts folder so when you view a build you see this: The coverage report is your standard rcov report: Flog output is thrown into an html file: At the end metric_fu calculates the average flog score per method: You might want to check out my previous posts on what to do with a Flog report: The Method Hit List and When You Should Ignore Metrics Saikuro's output is the same as always: (I changed the warning and error levels for this pic -

The Bug that Took Down a Release and How I Wrote It

We were disposing of some last minute bugs today and I was reminded of the time, a few projects ago, when I introduced a bug that screwed up a whole release. Let's say that I was writing a pizza ordering web site and, after many successful releases, the Big Wigs at PizzaCo wanted to introduce a new feature that would let customers customize their pizzas even more. In production the user could select style of pizza (thin, pan, stuffed), size, and toppings. There was even some cool logic in place to make sure the toppings were available before being offered. Now, in this brave new world of pizza, the customer would be given the chance to customize each topping. If you chose peppers, you would be given the choice of green, yellow, or red (through the magic of javascript). A choice of onions would prompt the question of red or yellow. Pepperoni? -- regular or spicy? So we wrote the feature, which was difficult, as we had to totally change how we interacted with the Topping Provid