Software Elegance - CAST Highlight

11 March 2016

Indicators & Methodology, Software Health

Definition

Software Elegance measures the ability to deliver software value with less code complexity. A low Software Elegance score indicates decreased quality in the code resulting in higher defects which may become costly to fix in the mid-term.

Thresholds

Thresholds used for Software Elegance categories:

Low/Red: below 39.0
Medium/Orange: from 39.0 to 70.0
High/Green: above 70.0

Code Insights

Find below some code insight examples which contribute to the Software Elegance index.

The code contain too many unused private methods

Boolean checks should not be inverted

Avoid to cover two dimensional ranges with nested for loop

The code is managing too many files together

‘switch’ statements should not be nested

The code contains too many “SELECT *” requests

Avoid using complex operands

Avoid methods or function with too many local variables

Methods with too many parameters can be complex

Nested loops can slow down innovation

Too many nested Loops decreases innovation

Declaring too many functions can make Javascript code complex

The code contains too many includes.

Nested Loops cause performance issues

Crossing the Parameter limit can cause bugs

Mixing DDL & DML operations can cause recompilation

Conditional expressions should not be too complex

SELECT clauses with many columns tend to be complex in nature.

EXIT closes the entire script

Structural code complexity may be too high

Code Complexity Software Elegance