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The Road to Quino 2.0: Maintaining architecture with NDepend (part I)

Published by marco on

Full disclosure

A while back—this last spring, I believe—I downloaded NDepend to analyze code dependencies. The trial license is fourteen days; needless to say, I got only one afternoon in before I was distracted by other duties. That was enough, however, to convince me that it was worth the $375 to continue to clean up Quino with NDepend.

I decided to wait until I had more time before opening my wallet. In the meantime, however, Patrick Smacchia of NDepend approached me with a free license if I would write about my experiences using NDepend on Encodo’s blog. I’m happy to write about how I used the tool and what I think it does and doesn’t do.[1]

History & Background

 Quino's first commitWe started working on Quino in the fall of 2007. As you can see from the first commit, the library was super-small and comprised a single assembly.

Fast-forward seven years and Version 1.13 of Quino has 66 projects/assemblies. That’s a lot of code and it was long past time to take a look a more structured look at how we’d managed the architecture over the years.

I’d already opened a branch in our Quino repository called feature/dependencyChanges and checked in some changes at the beginning of July. Those changes had come as a result of the first time I used NDepend to find a bunch of code that was in the wrong namespace or the wrong assembly, architecturally speaking.

Sidebar: Keeping branches mergeable

I wasn’t able to continue using this branch, though, for the following reasons.

  1. I got the hang of NDepend relatively quickly and got a bit carried away. Using ReSharper, I was able to make a lot of changes and fixes in a relatively short amount of time.
  2. I checked in all of these changes in one giant commit.
  3. I did this all five months ago.
  4. There have been hundreds of subsequent commits on the master branch, many of which also include global refactoring and cleanup.
  5. As a result of the above, merging master into feature/dependencyChanges is more trouble than it’s worth.

Release Methodology

With each Quino change and release, we try our hardest to balance backward-compatibility with maintainability and effort. If it’s easy enough to keep old functionality under an old name or interface, we do so.

We mark members and types obsolete so that users are given a warning in the compiler but can continue using the old code until they have time to upgrade. These obsolete members are removed in the next major or minor upgrade.

Developers who have not removed their references to obsolete members will at this point be greeted with compiler errors. In all cases, the user can find out from Quino’s release notes how they should fix a warning or error.

The type of high-level changes that we have planned necessitate that we make a major version-upgrade, to Quino 2.0. In this version, we have decided not to maintain backward-compatibility in the code with Obsolete attributes. However, where we do make a breaking change—either by moving code to new or different assemblies or by changing namespaces—we want to maintain a usable change-log for customers who make the upgrade. The giant commit that I’d made previously was not a good start.

Take Two

Since some of these changes will be quite drastic departures in structure, we want to come up with a plan to make merging from the master branch to the feature/dependencyChanges branch safer, quicker and all-around easier.

I want to include many of the changes I started in the feature/dependencyChanges branch, but would like to re-apply those changes in the following manner:

  • Split the giant commit into several individual commits, each of which encapsulates exactly one change; smaller commits are much easier to merge
  • Document breaking changes in the release notes for Quino 2.0
  • Blog about/document the process of using NDepend to clean up Quino[2]

So, now that I’m ready to start cleaning up Quino for version 2.0, I’ll re-apply the changes from the giant commit, but in smaller commits. At the same time, I’ll use NDepend to find the architectural breaks that caused me to make those changes in the first place and document a bit of that process.

Setting up the NDepend Project

I created an NDepend project and attached it to my solution. Version 1.13 of Quino has 66 projects/assemblies, of which I chose the following “core” assemblies to analyze.

 Initial assemblies

I can change this list at any time. There are a few ways to add assemblies. Unfortunately, the option to “Add Assemblies from VS Solution(s)” showed only 28 of the 66 projects in the Quino solution. I was unable to determine the logic that led to the other 38 projects not being shown. When I did select the projects I wanted from the list, the assemblies were loaded from unexpected directories. For example, it added a bunch of core assemblies (e.g. Encodo.Imaging) from the src/tools/Quino.CodeGenerator/bin/ folder rather than the src/libraries/Encodo.Imaging/bin folder. I ended up just taking the references I was offered by NDepend and added references to Encodo and Quino, which it had not offered to add.[3]

The NDepend Dashboard

Let’s take a look at the initial NDepend Dashboard.

 Initial NDepend Dashboard

There’s a lot of detail here. The initial impression of NDepend can be a bit overwhelming, I supposed, but you have to remember the sheer amount of interdependent data that it shows. As you can see on the dashboard, not only are there a ton of metrics, but those metrics are also tracked on a time-axis. I only have one measurement so far.

Any assemblies not included in the NDepend project are considered to be “third-party” assemblies, so you can see external dependencies differently than internal ones. There is also support for importing test-coverage data, but I haven’t tried that yet.

There are a ton of measurements in there, some of which interest me and others that don’t, or with which I disagree. For example, over 1400 warnings are in the Quino* assemblies because the base namespace—Encodo.Quino—doesn’t correspond to a file-system folder—it expects Encodo/Quino, but we use just Quino.

Another 200 warnings are to “Avoid public methods not publicly visible”, which generally means that we’ve declared public methods on internal, protected or private classes. The blog post Internal or public? by Eric Lippert (Fabulous adventures in coding) covered this adequately and came to the same conclusion that we have: you actually should make methods public if they are public within their scope.

There are some White Books about namespace and assembly dependencies that are worth reading if you’re going to get serious about dependencies. There’s a tip in there about turning off “Copy Local” on referenced assemblies to drastically increase compilation speed that we’re going to look into.

Dependencies and cycles

One of the white books explains how to use namespaces for components and how to “levelize” an architecture. This means that the dependency graph is acyclic—that there are no dependency cycles and that there are certainly no direct interdependencies. The initial graphs from the Encodo and Quino libraries show that we have our work cut out for us.

 Encodo & Quino Dependency Matrix Encodo interdependencies Quino interdependencies

The first matrix shows the high-level view of dependencies in the Encodo and Quino namespaces. Click the second and third to see some initial dependency issues within the Encodo and Quino assemblies.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten so far. Tune in next time for a look at how we managed to fix some of these dependency issues and how we use NDepend to track improvement over time.


[1] I believe that takes care of full disclosure.
[2] This is something I’d neglected to do before. Documenting this process will help me set up a development process where we use NDepend more regularly—more than every seven years—and don’t have to clean up so much code at once.
[3] After having read the recommendations in the NDepend White Book—Partitioning code base through .NET assemblies and Visual Studio projects (PDF)—it’s clear why this happens: NDepend recommends using a single /bin folder for all projects in a solution.