Friday, August 07, 2009

Reality Check with Virtual Decision

Remember real first engineers, Physicists. Physicists prove their formulas with indirect measurable factors. Temperature, weight, chemical reactions, reflections, light…

But how can virtual engineers observe the quality of their virtual work? How can software developers compare 2 different competing solutions? How can you map your code to reality?

Some measureable indirect indicators for decision quality:

 
• Number of “important” lines of code.
 
• Number of defects that happened from existing code.
 
• Number of classes, less classes make system simpler.
 
• Number of relationships, again less relationships make system simpler.
 
• Duplicated functionality, big nono.
 
• Performance.
 
• Other reports that can get generated by third party analyzers.
 
• Any other ideas?

Do you see that these criteria items can give some reality checks to software design decisions?