A few weeks ago I was contacted by Patrick Smacchia, the creator of NDepend, if I would check out the latest edition of their code quality tool. As I had an upcoming software audit assignment planned, I thought it would be a great occasion to see what NDepend brings to the table and how it can help me to improve my understanding of an unfamiliar codebase.
NDepend offers a lot of rules that are evaluated against your code. These rules can help you identify all kind of issues in your code.
If you want to learn more about this feature check out the following video:
All these rules are created using CQLinq(the code query language of NDepend) and can be customized to your needs (and the specificalities of your project).
One rule that got my interest was the ‘DDD - ubiquitous language check’. This rule allows you to check if the correct domain language terms are used. It is disabled by default(because it should be updated to reflect your domain language).
Let’s see how to update this rule and enable it:
- Open up the Queries and Rules explorer in Visual NDepend:
- Browse to the Naming Conventions section:
- On the right you’ll find the DDD rule in the list of rules
- Check the checkbox to enable the rule
- Click on the rule to open the edit window. Here you can update the CQLinq query to make it correspond with the ubiquitous language of your domain
- After changing the rule, click on the ‘Save’ icon to start using the updated rules