Adolfo,
>> > From a user perspective, I'm mostly interested in these qualities:
>> > - Good and stable API
>
>
> API stability can be tracked though proper versioning [1].
Given the developer knows how to use that correctly. Otherwise I agree.
>> > - Well tested
>
>
> Coverage metrics. Special mention for header-only projects: They should have
> 100% coverage, otherwise there are no guarantees that the code even builds.
Not available in ROS yet. We are aware of that too and are currently
looking into the
http://ltp.sourceforge.net/coverage/lcov.php tool.
> I'm not expecting to have an absolute quantitative measure of a project's goodness, but rather a few easily available quantitative metrics that can help me make a _qualitative_ assessment of how a prospective project fits a set of requirements.
I'd like to get as much quantitative information about a perspective
package as possible and the indicators such as comment to code ratio,
cyclomatic complexity, etc. are definitely informative.
Otherwise I'd suggest to implement your suggestions above and have
them integrated into the similar graphical display as in e.g.
http://wiki.ros.org/mocap_optitrack/Metrics.
D.
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