A signature survey is a simple text-only visualization of source code, pioneered by Ward Cunningham. The original was written with Java in mind and essentially strips out all characters except for curly braces and semicolons. Check out the project home page for screenshots, or try the interactive example to really get a feel for my version.
First I'll summarize a few of the neat points of Ward Cunningham's original Signature Survey:
- Quick visual summary of code of a file by file basis.
- Easy to distinguish classes with low and high complexity
- Helps represent a few defining characteristics of classes in an easy to remember form
Here are a few improvements that I implemented in mine:
- Distinction between methods, if statements, and loops.
- Tell at a glance how big methods tend to be in a single file; whether there are lots of small ones or a few huge ones
- Added color to mitigate the amount of syntactic noise and help to highlight possible trouble points.
- Include a line count and method count before the signature line of a file.
And a few things that were adjusted because of language and personal preference:
- VB.NET doesn't use curly braces or semicolons in the same way as c-style languages, so alternatives will have to be used.
- In the 'detailed view' of each file, I prefer to see just a list of methods, with parameter types and the return type, instead of the whole file. I can open the whole file in my main editor, but having a list of the methods in the order they are in is quite helpful.
Move vb_signature_survey.rb to the root directory of your project, then run
it.
{% highlight bash %} ruby vb_signature_survey.rb {% endhighlight %}
I searched around on github and sourceforge for a decent-sized vb.net project, and ended up with DWSIM. DWSIM is an open source chemical process simulator written in VB.NET.
I ran the script on this project and put up the results as an interactive example. Try browsing around and imagine having it up beside the actual source code in your editor of choice.