Ignominy: a Tool for Software Dependency and Metric Analysis with Examples from Large HEP Packages

摘要

Ignominy is a tool developed in the CMS IGUANA project to analyse the structure of software systems. Its primary component is a dependency scanner that distills information into human-usable forms. It also includes several tools to visualise the collected data in the form of graphical views and numerical metrics. Ignominy was designed to adapt to almost any reasonable structure, and it has been used to analyse several large projects. The original purpose of Ignominy was to help us better ensure the quality of our own software, and in particular warn us about possible structural problems early on. As a part of this activity it is now used as a standard part of our release procedure. We also use it to evaluate and study the quality of external packages we plan to make use of. We describe what Ignominy can find out, and how it can be used to visualise and assess a software structure. We also discuss the inherent problems of the analysis as well as the different approaches to modularity the tool makes quite evident. The focus is the illustration of these issues through the analysis results for several sizable HEP software projects.