Are there some projects that rate RPG source? like software metrics?

Question

I just wanted to know if you know of some projects that can help to decide whether the analyzed Source it is good code or bad RPG code.

I'm thinking on the terms of [Software metric], [McCabe Cyclomatic Number] and all those things.

I know that those numbers are mere a hunch or two, but if you can present your management a point score they are happy and i get to modernize all those programs that otherwise work as specified but are painful to maintain.

so yeah .. know any code analyzers for (ILE)RPG ?

Answer 1

If the issue is that the programs are painful to maintain, then the metric should reflect how how much pain is involved with maintaining them, such as "time to implement new feature X" vs "estimated time if codebase wasn't a steaming POS".

However, those are subjective (and always will be). IMO you're probably better off refactoring mercilessly to remove pain points from your development. You may want to look at the techniques of strangler applications to bring in a more modern platform to deliver new features without resorting to a Big Bang rewrite.

Answer 2

I've never seen one, although I wrote a primitive analyser for RPG400. With the advent of free form and subprocedures, it was too time consuming to modify. I wish there was an API that let me have access to the compiler lexical tables.

If you wanted to try it yourself, consider the notion of reading the bottom of the compiler listing and using the line numbers to at least get an idea of how long a variable lives. For instance, a global variable is 'worse' than a local variable. That can only be a guess because of GOTO and EXSR.

Lot of work.

Answer 3

The SD Source Code Search Engine (SCSE) is a tool for rapidly search very large set of source code, using the langauge structure of each file to index the file according to code elements (identifiers, operators, constants, string literals, comments). The SD Source code engine is usable with a wide variety of langauges such as C, C++, C#, Java ... and there's a draft version of RPG.

To the OP's original question, the SCSE engine happens to compute various metrics over files as it indexes them, including SLOC, Comments, blank lines, and Halstead and Cyclomatic Complexity measures. The metrics are made available as byprooduct of the indexing step. Thus, various metrics for RPG could be obtained.