Source code quality

Source
code quality

When you need to evaluate software products: applications, libraries,
frameworks... Open source software has a powerful tool to perform the
evaluation: the source code. It is like when buying a car, you see the
tyres, wheels, doors, interior equipment and so on, but it is worth to
open the bonnet and have a look at the engine.

Inspecting the
source code you can learn a lot of things about the software and the
team who developed it, if there is a disciplined and intelligent group
of people behind that software. The things I usually inspect while
browsing the source code developed by third parties are:

• Is
  the code is well organized? Does if it follows coding guide lines like this one
  for java or this
  one for c#?. Can you can understand what the classes and methods do
  reading the name? Is the code well commented?


• Is the code
  complex? Is it spaghetti
  code or not. The code is complex when there are classes very big,
  methods have many parameters, and contains a lot of lines, classes have a
  lot of dependencies with other classes. An the opossite, the code is
  simple if classes are small, methods does not contain a lot of lines,
  you can recognize well known design patterns,
  there are not duplicated blocks of code.


• Is the code managed
  with a version
  control system and the changes are reflected properly? Does the
  software have a bug database? Does it provide tests? Does it have a good
  logging system?

If you are an skilled developer or can ask
to one, you can also check more things regarding the source code, but
with these three aspects you can have a general idea about the source
code quality of a software product. It is impressive how your opinion
about the general quality of a product can change before and after
inspecting the source code. Is it better before to be tied to a software
product, to check also the source code. There will be less surprises in
the future.

Reference :
Source code quality