Quality automation

There is no arbitrary scale that can say definitely if some code's quality is bad or good. Unfortunately, the abstract concept of code quality cannot be measured and expressed in the form of numbers. Instead, we can measure various metrics of the software that are known to be highly correlated with the quality of code. The following are a few:

• The percentage of code covered by tests
• The number of code style violations
• The amount of documentation
• Complexity metrics, such as McCabe's cyclomatic complexity
• The number of static code analysis warnings

Many projects use code quality testing in their continuous integration workflows. A good and popular approach is to test at least the basic metrics (test coverage, static code analysis, and code style violations) and not allow the merging of any code to the main branch that scores poorly on these metrics.

In the following sections, we will discuss some interesting...