Analysis

The goal of the CodeCharta analysis is to be as flexible as possible when combining metrics.

There are many tools already available that generate metrics and we wanted to incorporate them as much as possible because we are standing on the shoulder of giants. Since most of them provide some kind of metrics export in a common format (csv, json, …) we naturally started out writing many small importers per source. For example we wrote a Sonarimporter, then a Csvimporter and later a Mergefilter to combine these sources. After a while this became a bit unwieldy and we bundled all these small tools under the banner of the CodeCharta Shell (ccsh).

All of these tools have in common that their input and/or output is a .cc.json which they usually enrich with quantitative measurements called metrics. We think these metrics are in some ways flawed but still very useful as a conversation starter. They should never finish a conversation (“You have to increase line_coverage!”).

If you want to learn more, you can read about good and bad metrics, how the ccsh works or how to create custom metrics or importers. And if you want to learn more about the CodeCharta importer and parser, have a look on the Analysing tools section.