December 19, 2006

Kwala - a Ruby code quality checker
Post by Peter Cooper

Kwala is a Ruby "source code build and quality checker". It produces reports like that shown in the screenshot above (although that only shows half of the detail).

Kwala is useful because it pulls together a lot of information from disparate sources into a single easy-to-read report. You get to see how well your code is commented, complexity "scores" for your code, and find out how many tagged comments you have in various areas (such as TODO, BUG and FIXME).

Kwala's installation is not the easiest in the world due to the requirement of several external tools (such as rcov and Saikuro) which are optional, but should be installed if you want the full set of results. Despite this, Kwala will be of great use to developers paranoid about the quality of their code as it can check for cyclomatic complexity, code duplication, and formatting issues.