Expert Python Programming - Third Edition

Code quality testing

There is no arbitrary scale that would say definitely if code quality is bad or good. Unfortunately, the abstract concept of code quality cannot be measured and expressed in the form of numbers. Instead, we can measure various metrics of the software that are known to be highly correlated with the quality of code. The following are a few:

• The number of code style violations
• The amount of documentation
• Complexity metrics, such as McCabe's cyclomatic complexity
• The number of static code analysis warnings

Many projects use code quality testing in their continuous integration workflows. The good and popular approach is to test at least basic metrics (static code analysis and code style violations) and not allow merging ...