Over on CodeBetter.com, Jeremy Miller has an interesting post entitled “Are Code Statistics Useful?” in which he likens monitoring code metrics to boiling frogs:

“If you drop a frog into boiling water he jumps right out. If you put a frog in cool water, then gradually heat the water to boiling, he won’t jump out.”

The whole point being that if you don’t monitor metrics like Cyclomatic complexity, all of a sudden you could have a problem on your hands, especially when dealing with legacy code. What a great analogy! Jeremy’s posting is an excellent read; however, it’s unclear towards the conclusion if the measured Cyclomatic complexity values are for single methods or classes in the aggregate.

Don’t forget to check out Raymond Lewallen’s posting entitled “Coupling, Abstractness, Stability - Measuring and Applying Code Metrics” also on CodeBetter.com, in which he muses about coupling metrics.