Metrics for Software-Architects

Software metrics can be used effectively to judge the maintainability and architectural quality of a code base. Even more importantly, they can be used as canaries in a coal mine to warn early about dangerous accumulations of architectural and technical debt.

First we will introduce some key metrics that every architect should know (e.g., average component dependency, propagation cost, structural debt index, and more). Then we talks about the journey to create a metric to measure maintainability and introduces a new metric maintainability level. This metric is promising because its value usually matches quite well the gut feeling of developers about the maintainability of their software systems. Also covered is the use of free and commercial tools to gather metrics and follow their trends in an automated way.