For a while I’ve been working on an idea and whitepaper around analyzing source code to measure the size and complexity. There are some tools around which can do this but my differentiator is that I was interested in BizTalk projects and wanted to look at how these could be measured. Note however this can be easily used for non-BizTalk projects too.
The aim is to be able to understand the size and complexity of a solution and to allow some real metrics to contribute to your understanding of the Total Cost of Ownership of your solution. Using the tools I have developed alongside this I have been working with some customers to integrate the analysis into the build and continuous integration processes so that we can produce a report of the code and also track changes over time to monitor how the code based vary in terms of size and complexity.
The whitepaper goes into the detail of the theory about how we measure code and is available on the following link:
The source code and application/tools which can do this for you are available on the following codeplex project site
http://biztalksolutionanaly.codeplex.com/
At this stage the project is being used to monitor approximately 20 code bases at two companies who have significant investments in BizTalk and I’m also looking for feedback from the community over other things we should measure.
It would be great to hear how you get on with this or if you have any views on it.