Scheduling NDepend for a set of solutions
I use NDepend to continuously run a scheduled code analysis on a bunch of solutions that make up a large part of the software infrastructure of a major Swedish company.
By scheduling them to run once a week, using previous results as a comparison baseline, it will be easier to detect what avoid and pin-point good practices that we want to embrace.
Although we use Team City, I can also run these analyses from my computer if needed.
The analysis workflow is triggered from a simple bat script that does the following:
- It first checks out each solution from source control.
- It then builds each solution with
devenv. - It then run a pre-created NDepend analysis for each solution.
- Each analysis is configured to publish the HTML report to a web serve.
- The web server is available for everyone in the project.
I have scheduled the script with the Task Scheduler, to run every Monday at 08.30. This works like a charm. The analyses runs each week and everyone is happy (at least I am).
After the first analysis, we noticed some things we could tweak to improve the architecture, reduce merge conflicts, avoid code duplication, etc. We look forward to improve over time.
One small tweak
When running the script manually, we noticed that it failed to launch NDepend if the code was unchanged. This was confusing, but the solution was simple.
Under Tools / Options / Anaysis, you can tell NDepend to always run a full analysis:
The default setting is often correct, since it will run a full analysis at least once per day, but we will keep this checked while we evaulate the process.
One final, small problem – help needed!
One remaining problem is that NDepend sometimes incorrectly complains that the solution DLLs are invalid. The last time this happened (after a major architectural change), I could not get it to work even by deleting and re-adding the DLL:s.
To solve this, I had to delete the NDepend project and re-create it from scratch. This is not ideal, so I hope that we will find a solution for it.