panopticon:

An optical instrument or device; a mechanical peep-show offering views of European capitals, etc., for public entertainment.
A circular prison with cells arranged around a central well, from which inmates can be observed at all times.
A place where all is on display; a public exhibition hall or showroom.

source: Oxford English Dictionary

panopticode:

A project dedicated to making code metrics so widely understood, valuable, and simple that their use becomes ubiquitous, thus raising the quality of software across the industry.

The Panopticode project provides a set of open source tools for gathering, correlating, and displaying code metrics.

The Good

There is a rich selection of tools available to the Java community for gathering code metrics. These tools can be invaluable for tasks such as:

Prioritizing refactoring and redesign work
Understanding unfamiliar or large code bases
Ensuring coding standards are being followed
Evaluating software quality
Informing extend -vs- rewrite decisions
Proving that contractual obligations have been met
Comparing competing tools

The Bad and The Ugly

While these tools are powerful they suffer from a number of problems such as:

Installation and configuration can be difficult and time consuming
Most only measure the status at a point in time and have no concept of historical data
Each tool represents its data in a proprietary format
It is very difficult to correlate data from different tools
It can be difficult to switch between competing tools that provide similar functions
Most have extremely limited reporting and visualization capabilities

The Solution

The Panopticode project was conceived to address all of the concerns above.

It provides a set of Ant build files to simplify configuring many of the most popular tools. Setting up a project can be as simple as:

Download and extract Panopticode in your project's home directory
Copy the PROJECT_HOME/panopticode/build-example.xml file to PROJECT_HOME/build.xml
edit the PROJECT_HOME/build.xml to specify your classpath and source code directory.
(optional) Select your source code management tool in the PROJECT_HOME/panopticode/panopticode-imports.xml

The whole thing can be easily done in 5 minutes. If you have a fast internet connection you could probably pull it off in 2 minutes :)

Now when you run your build using the metrics target you will get:

Emma - Unit test code coverage. By changing one line in your build file this can be switched to Cobertura.
CheckStyle - Validates that your code follows Sun's standards for Java. If you want to use a different set of rules you only need to change one parameter in your build file.
JDepend - Sophisticated OO quality metrics and package dependency checking.
JavaNCSS - Cyclomatic Complexity and size (NCSS) metrics.
Volatility - Measure change within your projects. Currently this only works with Subversion, but support for other SCM repositories is planned.
Duplicate Code - Using Simian. NOTE: If your project is not open source you must purchase a license for Simian after your free 15 day trial.
Panopticode Aggregator - Generates an XML file that integrates ALL of the information gathered above
Panopticode Reports
- Powerful visualizations, such as TreeMaps, that allow you to see the overall picture and an amazing amount of detail in a single view.
- Metric Correlation
- Historic Data

NOTE: In the current version (0.1) Only JDepend, Emma, and JavaNCSS metrics are integrated into the panopticode.xml file. However, all other metrics listed are gathered.

In the time you have spent reading this you could already be using Panopticode, so why don't you go download and try it. After you've played with it a bit you might want to check out the documentation to learn how to customize and extend Panopticode.

If you have any questions or ideas for Panopticode, or need any help, please let us know.

Sponsors:

ThoughtWorks - Project Lead's Employer

SourceForge - Project Hosting