A tool for extracting and visualizing source code metric trends

Abstract: The quality of code can be measured using source code metrics. Looking at the trends of these metrics over a period of time can show a potential decrease in code quality. Low quality code will lead to technical debt resulting in higher cost of maintenance for a software project. In the context of a research project related to this topic, a tool was created to analyse source code metric trends for Git repositories. This tool had two problems, it was slow and unreliable. Both of these issues were caused by the tool requiring target repositories to be built during the metrics collection. To solve these issues the tool will be modified to collect metrics straight from the source code files, thus not requiring a build process, leading to increased performance and higher reliability.The result was a six times increase in performance as well as the tool functioning on a wider range of repositories.