Putting a dollar value on code quality
- by Chris Nelson
As noted in another thread, "In most businesses, code quality is defined in dollars." So my company has an opportunity to acquire a large-ish C code base. Obviously, if the code quality is good, the code base is worth more than if it's poor. That is, if we can readily read, understand, and update the code, it's worth more to us than if it's a spaghetti-coded mess. Without being able to see the code ahead of time, we'd like to set some objective measure as an acceptance criteria like "If the XXX measure is below the price will be discounted YY%." What criteria can we or should we measure and what tool can we use to measure it?
