I've posted a few articles about cleaning up an FxCop backlog on my personal blog over the past year or so. When I started posting about backlog tooling back in June, I had intended to write at least a couple of posts about some of the tools that we had developed internally at FinRad. Unfortunately, "morning" sickness kicked in shortly thereafter, and I never quite got around to it. However, now that I've got a couple of hours to kill before heading off on maternity leave, I figured that I might as well make up for lost time...
Besides FxCop itself, our next most important backlog cleanup tool is a utility that we developed to count the remaining violations in the immediate and overall backlogs. It's this tool that allows us to track where we are with respect to the backlog cleanup on any given project. Every week, at the beginning of our FxCop training session, I present the current backlog status report, which is built based on the output of the statistics tool. It's this tool that makes it possible for us to know that, for example, in the 15 months since we started our backlog cleanup effort, we've managed to reduce our total violations in the DevLogic code base by almost 50%.
The graph below shows the cleanup progress for our DevLogic code base:
Aside from the big hit we took in August 2007 upon migration of the bulk of the DevLogic code base to C#, and a few smaller hits when adding new rules and upgrading to .NET 2.0, we've been making pretty steady progress. Given the total size of our backlog (curse those old naming standards! <gdr>), being able to see that progress is really quite important with respect to keeping us motivated to continue the clean-up effort.
If you're running your own backlog cleanup and would like to give the stats tool a whirl, please feel free to grab a copy from CodePlex...
Print | posted on Friday, February 15, 2008 2:33 PM