The easiest way to keep a code base clean is to avoid dependency cycles between its components. Components are useful to partition a huge amount of code into smaller and understandable pieces. If a dependency cycle involves N components, these N components represent a single super-component. Indeed, the benefits of having N smaller components are lost: any component can be potentially broken by a change in any of the others components, you cannot unit test a component in isolation from the N-1 other ones and finally, all N components must be versioned and deployed all together.

Whether you consider that your components are classes, namespaces, assemblies or a mix in between, NDepend detects dependency cycles between them. It can also help you to find the right way to get rid of a particular dependency cycle. Once dependency cycles have been removed, NDepend can continuously check your code base to warn you as soon as a cycle is accidentally created.



Related Links::
White papers: Control Component Dependencies

See an online demo that explains how to remove dependency cycles with NDepend (5mn).

Keep your code structure clean
Layering, the Level metric and the Discourse of Method
Re-factoring, Re-Structuring and the cost of Levelizing