I hav been using the Metrics plugin for Eclipse developed by Lance Walton (for StateOfFlow) over the last couple of months. The plugin is very elegant and I thought it would be great if I could have a look at how it's computing the individual metrics. So I contacted the author, Lance, and enquired about the source code. Turned out that not only the code is available (from the CVS repository at sourceforge), but also that Lance has some interesting ideas he's willing to share.

I will not tell you just yet what these ideas were. All will appear here in due course. For now I will only say that the code for the plugin is rather intelligible and that I managed to make a little extension of my own to it.

To be more particular, I added a new metric - Number of Try Blocks (NOTB) - which will warn the developer of having too many try blocks within a singe method. The maximum number of try blocks allowed is 1 by default, but the user can alter the upper bound via Window>>Preferences>>Metrics dialogue.