Dependency Graph

• This diagram represents the Graph of Dependencies between the .NET assemblies of your application.
• This static diagram can be useful but it is just a coarse view of your application architecture.
• It is recommended to use the NDepend interactive Dependency Graph and interactive Dependency Matrix found in the NDepend UI for an in-depth exploration of the actual architecture of your code.
  

Online documentation:

• NDepend Interactive Dependency Graph
• NDepend Interactive Dependency Matrix

Dependency Matrix

• This diagram represents the DSM (Dependency Structure Matrix) beetween the .NET assemblies of your application.
• The Dependency Matrix is a compact way to represent and navigate across dependencies between components.
• The number on cells of the Dependency Matrix included in the report, represent the number of types involved in the coupling
• It is recommended to use the NDepend interactive Dependency Matrix and interactive Dependency Graph found in the NDepend UI for an in-depth exploration of the actual architecture of your code.

Online documentation:

• NDepend Interactive Dependency Matrix
• NDepend Interactive Dependency Graph

Visualizing Code Metrics through Treemaping

• In this Metric View, the code base is represented through a Treemap.
• Treemapping is a method for displaying tree-structured data by using nested rectangles.
• In the present treemap, each rectangle represents a method and the area of a rectangle is proportional to the number of lines of code of the corresponding method.
• It is recommended to use the NDepend interactive Metric View found in the NDepend UI for an in-depth code metrics exploration.

With the Online documentation, understand how Treemaping can help you see patterns in your code base, that would be hard to spot with other ways.

• Visualizing Code Metrics with Treemap

Abstractness versus Instability Diagram

The Abstractness versus Instability Diagram helps to detect which assemblies are potentially painful to maintain (i.e concrete and stable) and which assemblies are potentially useless (i.e abstract and instable).

• Abstractness: If an assembly contains many abstract types (i.e interfaces and abstract classes) and few concrete types, it is considered as abstract.
  
• Instability: An assembly is considered stable if its types are used by a lot of types from other assemblies. In this context stable means painful to modify.

Online documentation:

• Definitions of related Code Metrics

For beginners: Where to start

• Search for unwanted dependencies.
• Look for complex methods listed through the standard Rule Quick Summary of methods to refactor.
• Inspect other standard Rules that were violated.
• See how standard Rules are written and customize some Rules to your needs.
• Look at Code Metrics definitions to see how Code Metrics can help increase code quality.
• Use the Code Diff feature to review code changes (pro edition only).
• Import test coverage data to assess possible improvements in your testing strategy (pro edition only).

Code queries and rules results are truncated to list a maximum of 100 code elements in this report

• It is recommended to use the NDepend interactive UI capabilities to browse a large list of code elements matched.
• To enable or disable this setting, there is a tickbox labelled Don't show more than 100 matched items for a Rule violated in the NDepend Project Properties panel > Report tab > Avoid too big report for large code base section
• This setting is enabled by default to avoid to have too large reports when analyzing large code bases.

Does this report gets too large?

• There is a setting enabled by default to avoid to have too large reports when analyzing large code bases.
• To enable or disable this setting, there is a tickbox labelled Don't show more than 100 matched items for a Rule violated in the NDepend Project Properties panel > Report tab > Avoid too big report for large code base section
• It is recommended to use the NDepend interactive UI capabilities to browse a large list of code elements matched.

Quick Tips

• In addition to the NDepend report, use the interactive UI through the standalone executable VisualNDepend.exe, or through the Visual Studio NDepend Addin.
• With the interactive UI, browse more detailed data and have Rules checking updated each time the code is modified and recompiled.
• The analysis execution and the report options are configurable through the interactive UI, in the panel Project Properties.
• Plain HTML report (single HTML page, no javascript, no menu) is also available.
• Full NDepend documentation is available on the NDepend website under the Documentation menu.