An Eclipse plug-in to help “defend” Java developers against overly complex and untested code has been implemented as a prototype by the founder of Agitar Software.Given the unusual acronym, “crap4j,” for Change Risk Analyzer and Predictor for Java, the plug-in and metric are “highly experimental in nature,” at this point, said Alberto Savoia, Agitar founder and CTO, in a blog. “The Change Risk Analysis and Prediction (CRAP) score uses cyclomatic complexity and code coverage from automated tests to help estimate the effort and risk associated with maintaining legacy code. We started working on an open-source experimental tool called “crap4j” that calculates the CRAP score for Java code. We need more experience and time to fine-tune it, but the initial results are encouraging and we have started to experiment with it in-house,” Savoia said. The plug-in can be downloaded here. Software Development