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Author's profile photo Christian Drumm

Software Metrics in the Code Inspector

Introduction

Recently I was reading about software metrics for a customer project. In particular I looked at the cyclomatic complexity (aka McCabe complexity) and the Halstead complexity. There are known issues with different complexity measures as well as limitation to their applicability. Nevertheless, those metrics can provide additional information regarding the complexity and maintainability of software.

What I wasn’t aware before is, that the Code Inspector (transaction SCI) already offers quite software metrics out of the box. In the remainder of this block I show how to configure the Code Inspector to calculate the delivered software metrics.

Creating a Software Metrics Check Variant

In order to calculate software metrics using the Code Inspector the first step is to create a check variant. Be sure to create a global check variant. Only global check variants can later be used from within ADT. For this blog I created a check variant named Z_SOFTWARE_METRICS.

In this check variant I only activated the checks in the “Metrics and Statistics” group.

Furthermore, I set the reporting to “Show metrics”. There reason is twofold. First, I wanted to see that the software metrics are calculated and what the actual results are. Second, the default thresholds for any warning are so high, that you’d have to write really really complex (i.e. bad) code in order to trigger the warnings. Of cause it would have also been possible to lower the thresholds for the warnings.

However, this didn’t have the expected result. The calculated metrics where not displayed. Therefore, I change the reporting to “Show warnings” and the threshold to 1 for all metrics.

Triggering the Calculation of the Software Metrics

After the check variant is created it is now possible to trigger the calculation of the software metrics in the ADT. To do this right click on the object (program, class, package) for which the metrics should be calculated. In the context menu select “Run As” → “ABAP Test Cockpit with…”

This opens a popup windows in which the check variant can be selected. Note that this window support search and completion using the <ctrl>-<space> shortcut. So simply type Z and trigger the search to select the required check variant.

For this blog I recreate one of the famous counter examples of the cyclomatic complexity metric, a case statement mapping the numbers 1 to 7 to weekdays. Below is the the complete source code of the example.

CLASS zcl_mccabe_example DEFINITION
  PUBLIC
  FINAL
  CREATE PUBLIC .

  PUBLIC SECTION.
    METHODS day_of_week IMPORTING i_day_number      TYPE i
                        RETURNING VALUE(r_day_name) TYPE string.
  PROTECTED SECTION.
  PRIVATE SECTION.
ENDCLASS.


CLASS ZCL_MCCABE_EXAMPLE IMPLEMENTATION.
  METHOD day_of_week.

    CASE i_day_number.
      WHEN 1.
        r_day_name = 'Monday'.
      WHEN 2.
        r_day_name = 'Tuesday'.
      WHEN 3.
        r_day_name = 'Wednesday'.
      WHEN 4.
        r_day_name = 'Thursday'.
      WHEN 5.
        r_day_name = 'Friday'.
      WHEN 6.
        r_day_name = 'Saturday'.
      WHEN 7.
        r_day_name = 'Sunday'.
      WHEN OTHERS.
        r_day_name = 'unknown'.
    ENDCASE.

  ENDMETHOD.
ENDCLASS.

The following screenshot shows the code of this example as well as the result of calculating the software metrics. Markers were added to some of the lines (e.g. 1, 15 and 17).

Detailed results of the calculated metrics are shown in the ATC Problems view. For the example the calculated cyclomatic complexity is the expected 8. Furthermore, also the Halstead metrics were calculated.

Happy measuring.
Christian

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      10 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Michael Keller
      Michael Keller

      I wrote a little implementation of the mentioned metrics in my "SAPscript forms breakdown helper". McCabe is a great help in my opinion although one can cheat this metric also. But even simple statistics like "comment lines" or "empty lines" help a lot.

      Therefore many thanks for the hint regarding ABAP source code and metrics.

      Author's profile photo Lars Hvam
      Lars Hvam

      Something like having a bit CASE statement with 20 WHENs is easy to understand but counts 20 towards cyclomatic complexity.

      Would like to try out https://www.sonarsource.com/docs/CognitiveComplexity.pdf sometime, I hope to implement it sometime in abapOpenChecks or abaplint 🙂

      Author's profile photo Christian Drumm
      Christian Drumm
      Blog Post Author

      What I actually would like to do is to take 10 Years of data from some ERP module and the corresponding OSS tickets and compare the different metrics on that basis. lets see if I can get a student for this ?

      Author's profile photo Thomas Fiedler
      Thomas Fiedler

      Hi Christian,

      we are working on a graphical representation of complexity analysis data incl. number of transports in our Custom Code Migration Fiori App (Link) This should help customers better estimate their custom code efforts in a S/4HANA conversion.

      Regards,

      Thomas.

      Author's profile photo Andre Fischer
      Andre Fischer

      Hi Christian,

      did you change the settings only for the item "Procedural Metrics" or for all entries that you have selected beneath "Metrics and Statistics"?

      For me it was also not obvious that I had to click on the green button with the yellow arrow since I have not worked with transaction SCI before.

      And one ask. Would it be possible to add the code in a code box instead of a screen shot?

      Best Regards,

      Andre

      Author's profile photo Christian Drumm
      Christian Drumm
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Andre Fischer,

      I added the complete source code for the example also in a code box.

      Yes, the usage of SCI is a little special ?. I change the settings also for the "Procedural Metrics" in this example. But it is also possible to change the parameters for the other metrics.

      Christian

      Author's profile photo Mike Pokraka
      Mike Pokraka

      Hey Christian,

      Thanks for publishing this. I still find the Eclipse sorely lacking in this area. Using SCI, you can drill down and get a list view of all your modules and their metrics and even download everything to Excel - might be useful to include this in your blog.

      Cheers,
      Mike

      Author's profile photo Karsten Schaser
      Karsten Schaser

      Hi Christian,

      you set the threshold to 1 for all metrics above. This approach however shows of course a lot of "findings". Are there any empirical values or rule of thumb regarding reasonable thresholds for these metrics?

      Additionally I was wondering, if there might be different thresholds depending on the type of code you write. I.e. writing generic code, which is used in frameworks, might be naturally more complex than a business application. What is your opinion?

      Thanks and best regards,

      Karsten

      Author's profile photo Joachim Rees
      Joachim Rees

      Very nice, thanks for sharing!

      (I was wondering about ABAP software metrics / statistics, and I did a "search-before-you-post" so this is how I found it! 😉

      Best
      Joachim

      Author's profile photo Joachim Rees
      Joachim Rees

      What I had in mind was some kind of statistics like:

      - Lines of Code: __
      - Of that: Comments: ___
      - (Of that: Comments that look like code: ___ )

      I played around a bit and I think the Statement Statistics come closest to that:

      My thought here is: When I tackle a refactoring project, first thing I want to do is get the statistics.

      Then, while refactoring towards clean(er) code, I think that lines of code and lines of comments should decrease. (Because the code becomes more elegant and compact, and I'll delete (instead of comment out) un-needed code).

      Any ideas or thoughts on that? Is there maybe an Eclipse-Plugin (would not have to be ABAP-Specific, I guess) capable of doing such statistics?

      Joachim

      PS: Oh, I couldn't make out a block like in the screenshot (SCI) in AdT - there it just looks like noise... 🙁