Part of a Ph.D Project by Thomas Butler at the University of Northampton in the UK, Insphpect is a proof of concept to develop a metric for analyzing source code flexibility by identifying programming practices known to reduce flexibility. For example, global variables and singletons.
The methodology in details is explained in details in this page, however it’s interesting to see that the findings confirm that the practices identified are widely considered to be bad practices and have negative effects on code flexibility. A metric was developed to analyse the overall flexibility of a piece of code (A libray, individual project, etc). It takes into account the size of the project and grades it on a score of 0-100.
How Insphpect works ?
The solution works by scanning the source code for known bad practices (as identifed in the research above) and grading the software based on the frequency of bad practices encountered. You can see for example a report of the Symfony/Routing here :
Great work to take code quality to the next level, and make sure you contribute in the survey here.
More information about Insphpect at https://insphpect.com/
