Re: Code analysis tool

Dear sir
         what spicificly I want to measure are to levels of Quality , first 
is the design level , I will give you our main list of targets to measure 
(It can be expanded later) :

* Detect and report cyclic inheritance (this should be cought on compile 
time but not by all compilers or all languages)

* calculate depth of inheritance (number of parents) { we can't say when the 
depth of inheritance has exceeded proper level but the user can decide that 
from the report we generate }

* Detect and report the number of children of a class.

* calculate the Weighted Methods per Class (WMC)

* Detect and report high cyclomatic complexity within methods. {Also there 
is no defined number for HIGH but the user can define it in run time or the 
tool will generate a report of weights of classes and he chooses what to say 
to be HIGH }

* Detect methods implemented as one big loop or heavy weighted loops.

* Detect and report  Intermodule dependency. {Class coupling , Inheritance 
and aggregation, etc..}

* Detect and report modules that can be candidates to be reusable modules.

* Detect and report the Using message passing as primary inter-process 
communication. { decrease efficiency at runtime }

That's our main design issues that we plan to detect and report till now if 
the base parsing engine and analyser is built this list can be expanded to 
include other flaws.

on the other side there is the code level , we intended to ensure C++ 
checklist provided by OpenOffice.org but we didn;t know it is out of date , 
we need to find a decent alternative in ADDITION to it , our Java specific 
checklist will be gained from Sun developers community , we will generate a 
generic checklist that could be used for any OOP language .

code conventions supported will be those of OpenOffice.org mainly plus we 
will use GNU http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html code standars 
(we will not be able to deliver all)

Now to your Question, yes I've checked what tools already exist in this area 
commercial and open source , they all concentrate on code level , few 
detected design issues (.NET code analysis tool was a great deal) but my 
tool will be better/different for the following reasons I hope :

* This tool will be mainly designed for openoffice.org standards so it will 
be more usable for OOo developers.

* This tool will be free and open source.

*This tool will include more than one language and will enable language 
insertion at run time intelligently (major difference in our plan)

* This tool will be able to focus on design and code analysis in the same 
time without affecting  efficiency of any , any new issues will be plugged 
in easily.

* Generating XMI files of design generated from code will enable many design 
tools (mainly ARGOUML) to read it and view digrams of the code.

That's our main goal of improving our work than the current existing tools , 
  as soon as we generate any prototypes I will inform you for your comments 
(we have now an XMI parser and analyser for only four of the design issues 
mensioned).

Thanks for your time and support
waiting for your comments.

Mohammed.