I’ve posted on a retrospective of my team’s current release, and I’ve run a few code analysis numbers to get a baseline trend.

I normally don’t do code analysis since working code is our real goal, but here it is:
I analyzed our latest component, which is a part of a larger software product.  This component delivers tremendous business value, and it was developed from scratch on my team using XP methods.  Here’s the stats:
Statements: 6600
Productions statements: 2500.  The rest is test code.
Number of classes 141 – 71 production classes.  The rest are test classes.
7.5 methods per class.
About 5 lines of code per method on average.
Maximum cyclomatic complexity of any method: 6.  Average is 1.5

We have a few methods that are close to 20 lines of code, but the number of those can be counted on 1 hand.

This release has seen very few bugs
I don’t see any value in using code metrics as a direct measurement of the quality of the code.  It may be a trend, but there is no causality between the two.  It is, however, interesting to look at the trends from time to time.

• We ended up with 2 times as much test code as production code.
• Our classes ended up very small.  Our methods even smaller.
• Our method cyclomatic complexity averaged between 1 and 2.
• We ended up with about 5 actual bugs in the release.  This might seem unreal, but I credit all the automated test coverage for this result.

I know some of you will cringe at the thought of writing two times as much test code as production code, but given the results we have achieved, I consider it worth it.