The Path to Zen

The NoOF Development Metrics

Fire up your favorite IDE, close all the files that are already open, and start implementing an individual feature of your project, just how you normally would go about it. Along the way, remember not to close any editor window (or tabs, or buffers, you got the idea) once it’s been opened. When you are done, count the Number of Open Files you have got so far – that’s the NoOF index for that particular feature. Repeat the process, and you have the average NoOF index of your project, which I think really tells something about the complexity of the framework/architecture your project employs.

I did this today while implementing a simple form submission feature on this “enterprisey” project I’m working on, and got about 15 open files when I’m done: 2 jsp pages, 1 event handler class, 1 page modeler class, 2 constant definition interfaces, 1 presentation framework configuration file (to tie everything together), 1 application configuration file, 2 business interfaces, 2 EJB beans, 1 Dao (lucked out in that tier – it’s a God Dao ), 2 sql scratch files (to test the sqls on various DBs).

Oh wait, I forgot to write junit test cases…