ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy that focuses on agile development, recently announced they will leverage the software architecture management tool Structure101 for assessing the quality of code bases. Structure101 is the main product that Headway Software provides for advanced code analysis.
According to the press release ThoughtWorks plans to integrate Structure101 in its Technology Healthcheck service offering. When providing this service, ThoughtWork consultants investigate and assess systems across an organization.
This hands-on, on-site service uses a variety of open source and commercial tools to ascertain the quality characteristics of the code base. Quality metrics allow organizations to make informed decisions about their software.
For this purpose, the company is leveraging diagnostic tools such as Headway’s Structure101 which helps assessing the architectural quality of software systems. A core problem when building software systems is to keep their complexity manageable and their quality at a high level. This turns out to be even more challenging but also more essential for large code bases. Structure101 is analyzing the quality of such code bases by
advanced reverse engineering, structural analysis and architectural mapping techniques for Java, .Net, C/C++, and more.
According to Headway, the tool allows designers and architects to analyze and visualize the structure of code bases, measure structural complexity and show alerts whenever specific violations are detected, define architectural rules such as compositions and layering rules, and highlight structural changes between different versions of a code base.
Structure101 provides a Web application, but also plug-ins for Microsoft Visual Studio, Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA.
By the partnership with Headway Software, senior architects of ThoughtWorks like Erik Doernenburg and Neal Ford hope to
deliver a high value service that improves the asset value of our client's software investments.
Interested software engineers might obtain trial versions from Headway’s download site.