Quality From Up-High

Over at InfoQ Erik Doernenberg gives a nice talk on Software Quality presenting some simple and not so simple metrics along with some thresholds for giving a general quality overview of your software:

• Cyclometric Complexity per Line of Code
• No. of methods per class
• Lines of Code per method
• Lines of Test code to lines of production code

Based on these metrics it's easy to knock up a simple dashboard in Excel. At the end of each sprint I run the Calculate Code Metrics tool in Visual Studio and import the data in to my database. The Excel spreadsheet retrieves the data with a couple of SQL requests.

Some graphs plot the data over time: