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<h1>Code Metrics</h1>

<p>Code metrics can be produced by static code analysis tools to determine

complexity and non-standard practices.</p>

<h2>Why are code metrics important?</h2>

<p>Code metrics allow developers to find problematic codebase areas that may

need refactoring. In addition, some metrics such as technical debt assist

developers in communicating to non-technical audiences why issues with a

system are occurring.</p>

<h2>Open source code metrics projects</h2>

<p><a href="http://radon.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html">Radon</a> is a tool for

obtaining raw metrics on line counts, Cyclomatic Complexity, Halstead

metrics and maintainability metrics.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.pylint.org/">Pylint</a> contains checkers for PEP8 code

style compliance, design, exceptions and many other source code analysis

tools.</p>

<p><a href="https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyflakes">PyFlakes</a> parses source files for

errors and reports on them.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/python/pyntch/index.html">Pyntch</a> is a

static code analyzer that attempts to detect runtime errors. It does not

perform code style checking.</p>

<h2>Hosted code metrics services</h2>

<li><a href="https://landscape.io/">Landscape</a> provides free code metrics for open

source Python projects. Pricing is available for analyzing private

repositories as well.</li>

<h2>Code metrics resources</h2>

<p><a href="http://doughellmann.com/2008/03/01/static-code-analizers-for-python.html">Static Code Analizers for Python</a>

is an older article but goes over the basics of what Python static code

analyzers do.</p>

<p>This <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1428872/pylint-pychecker-or-pyflakes">Stack Overflow question on Python static code analysis tools</a>

contains comparison discussions of PyLint, PyChecker and PyFlakes.</p>

<p><a href="http://jbisbee.blogspot.ca/2014/04/getting-started-with-pylint.html">Getting Started with Pylint</a>

goes over setting up Pylint, generating the .pylintrc file and what's

in the configuration.</p>

<h3>What's next after obtaining code metrics?</h3>

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