gist:1127d8ac4bfc32afaa93

Many of the best resources on the actual data behind code metrics are in white papers, dry IBM and .NET "Developer Zone" journals, and in Java land. Here's a bunch of links from when I was putting together my code metrics talk I gave at Steel City a couple years ago.

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

OO Design Quality Metrics: An Analysis of Dependencies

http://www.objectmentor.com/resources/articles/oodmetrc.pdf

Oh, Uncle Bob.. you've already done everything cool, haven't you?

This paper describes a set of metrics that can be used to measure the quality of an object-oriented design in terms of the interdependence between the subsystems of that design. Designs which are highly interdependent tend to be rigid, unreusable and hard to maintain. Yet interdependence is necessary if the subsystems of the design are to collaborate. Thus, some forms of dependency must be desirable, and other forms must be undesirable. This paper proposes a design pattern in which all the dependencies are of the desirable form. Finally, this paper describes a set of metrics that measure the conformance of a design to the desirable pattern

How useful are code metrics?

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=157839

C2 XP Wiki

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WelcomeVisitors

OMG this is a gorram national treasure and its mysteries can be plumbed for days. Definitely one time where reading the comments is essential.

Getting Empirical about Refactoring

http://www.stickyminds.com/article/getting-empirical-about-refactoring

Michael Feather's article that inspired the Turbulence gem

Predicting Bugs from History

http://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/9783540764397-c1.pdf?SGWID=0-0-45-515407-p173780334

Uncovering Causal Relationships between Software Metrics and Bugs

http://homepages.dcc.ufmg.br/~mtov/pub/2012_csmr.pdf

This is probably the one you're really looking for.

I'm not a member, but there's a lot of great research articles on bug density, complexity, cohesion, etc

Random good things

McCabe, Tom. 1976. "A Complexity Measure." IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, SE-2, no. 4 (December): 308-20 Shen, Vincent Y., et al. 1985. "Identifying Error-Prone Software--An Empirical Study." IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering SE-11, no.4 (April): 317-24. Ward, William T. 1989. "Software Defect Prevention Using McCabe's Complexity Metric." Hewlett-Packard Journal, April, 64-68.

No Silver Bullet - Essence and Accident in Software Engineering

http://faculty.salisbury.edu/~xswang/Research/Papers/SERelated/no-silver-bullet.pdf or http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~cah/G51ISS/Documents/NoSilverBullet.html

Refactoring towards "better" code

http://blowmage.com/2013/03/07/refactoring-better-code

Mike walks through a refactoring, and shows a solid pattern of extraction, along with a great argument for it at the end:

Schizophrenic code, by which I mean methods with an inconsistent level of abstraction, is difficult to reason about. Programmers new to your app will struggle more than necessary in order to understand how the app works. I've seen this over and over, and the effect is similar to hazing new members of a group. Don't be a code bully, whether intentional or not. Life is too short to deal with hostile code. Be nice in all that you do, including your code.