NDepend

What do you like best?

I love NDepend's visualizations. Specifically, their tree map visualization helps me pinpoint code quality issues or test coverage weaknesses. This is critical for communicating technical debt to management and getting buy-in for changes that need to happen.

Additionally, the newer code visualization features are wonderful and something I leave open as a sort of map of my code, even when I'm not actively using NDepend's code smells tracking features, this navigation pane helps me quickly visualize the context of my current code within a larger application.

What do you dislike?

If you want to get really deep into the weeds, NDepend will let you, and you may need to modify rule definitions to fit your code or add annotations to suppress false positives on code rule analysis, though this problem is significantly better than it was only a few years ago.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Prior to last year's updates, I would recommend you give NDepend to your team leads. Now, I would keep that recommendation and also add any up-and-coming power-users to the set who would benefit from the visualizations that NDepend offers for your code. It's also worth it to consider a build server integration license.

NDepend serves a lot of different scenarios, but it's going to amplify the best people on your teams.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

NDepend serves a number of key scenarios:

- It helps me track technical debt trends over time

- It helps me identify the weaker areas of my own code

- It helps me visualize my code by diagramming the larger context

- It highlights issues I might not have seen

- Some editions can be integrated into my build pipeline to conduct automated analysis of all code and potentially reject code with insufficient quality or testing

Probably the biggest benefit I've seen in a workplace is the usage of NDepend visualizations to help explain technical debt to management and justify projects to remedy key issues in code. It gave me the tools I needed to pick the right battles and win those battles.