Now, as a developer, how do you help managers and business people understand the internal quality of code? They generally want a bit more than “it’s horrible” before they prioritise cleaning up the code over implementing new features that directly deliver business value. Or even: how do you figure out for yourself how bad some code actually is in relation to some other code?
Nice visualization of problems in a Java codebase. Given that I'm currently involved in assessing a 15000 line Rails codebase, I wonder whether something similar exists for Ruby?
The only similar thing I’m aware of is http://metric-fu.rubyforge.org/ See http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/13/Rails%20Software%20Metrics%20Presentation.pdf for an introduction. Cave at: haven’t used this tools so cannot comment on its qualities.