In one of his latest entries, Sebastian Bergmann answers a question from another blogger about the future of software metrics and project mess detection as a part of the PHPUnit project.

When I started to work on these projects, there was no other place for me then to develop them as part of PHPUnit. [...] But the more I thought about it, I realized that these features do not belong into PHPUnit but into a suite of tools that PHPUnit is a well-integrated part of.

He did, however, include it as a part of the PHPUnit 3.2 release at that time. Now, however, there are the tools and platforms to make those tests useful outside of the PHPUnit environment and is allowing him to move it out from the testing application and on to closer integration with other software.

Nick Halstead has posted two more programming tips in his series - this time they cover "non-coding" and "XHTML analytics:

The first, tip #7, was written up by Jonathan Holland. He talks about a method of using metrics software that works correctly with XHTML syntax. His example script basically does a dynamic add to the page when it's loaded to put the script tag in after the validation has taken place.

The next tip, #8 (written by Dordea Cosmin), looks at "non coding" types of things you can do to help work towards success in your company. These sorts of things include diplomacy, being friendly, and continuing education.

Sebastian Bergmann mentions today about a feature in an upcoming release of a popuular unit testing tool for PHP, PHPUnit - the addition of more software metrics.

The upcoming 3.1.6 release of PHPUnit adds a couple of software metrics to the data that is stored in PHPUnit's test database. Among these metrics is the Cyclomatic Complexity Number (CCN).

An example of how the CCN works is shown in the post giving the className, methodName and the complexity ranking given for the combination. His example shows the rankings for a part of the eZ Components software.