This Eclipse plugin calculates various metrics for your code during build cycles and warns you, via the Problems view, of 'range violations' for each metric. This allows you to stay continuously aware of the health of your code base. You may also export the metrics to HTML for public display or to CSV or XML format for further analysis. This export can be performed from within Eclipse or using an Ant task.
Note that although metrics can be useful in a software development effort, they should not take the place of good taste and experience. Also, metrics are more useful as indicators of unhealthy code than they are as indicators of healthy code, i.e. a codebase with many range violation warnings is probably an indication that the code needs to be refactored but no range violation warnings does not necessarily mean that the code is good.
Installing the Plugin
Either use the update site at http://www.stateofflow.com/UpdateSite or download the latest version of the plugin, unzip it into your plugins/dropins directory and (re)start Eclipse.
Using the Plugin
Please see the 'State Of Flow Eclipse Metrics' help pages in Eclipse once you have installed the plugin.
Useful Facts
Eclipse Metrics:
- requires Eclipse to be running under JDK 1.5 at least
- has been tested on Ganymede running on MacOS X and Windows
- reportedly runs without problems on Linux too
- reportedly runs on Europa as well
- is released under the The Common Public License - v 1.0
- has been found to be quite useful
- is not to everybodies taste. If you don't like it, try another great metrics plugin for Eclipse, which you can find here
Bugs
Please report bugs on Sourceforge.