RETICULA: Real-time code quality assessment

Abstract

Code metrics can be used to assess the internal quality of software systems, and in particular their adherence to good design principles. While providing hints about code quality, metrics are difficult to interpret. Indeed, they take a code component as input and assess a quality attribute (e.g., code readability) by providing a number as output. However, it might be unclear for developers whether that value should be considered good or bad for the specific code at hand. We present RETICULA (REal TIme Code qUaLity Assessment), a plugin for the IntelliJ IDE to assist developers in perceiving code quality during software development. RETICULA compares the quality metrics for a project (or a single class) under development in the IDE with those of similar open source systems (classes) previously analyzed. With the visualized results, developers can gain insights about the quality of their code. A video illustrating the features of RETICULA can be found at: https://reticulaplugin.github.io/.