Sitting down to check out a copy of NDepend is very intimidating. You see, I’ve been intrigued by the product ever since reading Hanselman’s description of its capabilities. Scott also put up a cheat sheet of sorts to the metrics used in NDepend’s analysis.
Rather than a rehash, go check the article, another bang-up job by Scott. What is intimidating is all the analysis you can do with this tool, it makes you feel like you should be doing something smart with it.
For that problem, I can’t say I have a good solution for you. Perhaps if I was in charge of more than a handful of developers as a architect, and coded less frequently, this tool would feel more comforting to me. In my current capacity as a dev lead, working daily in .NET with a team of other senior dev’s, I haven’t quite entered that “Zone of Pain”.
One thing I give kudo’s to the NDepend team for is their Videos and Tutorials and comprehensive help. Clearly I’m not the only one some confusion on how to make the most of this tool and it’s great to know that the product team has put serious work into making the tool discoverable and useful.
Another nice feature, is an ability to call out NDepend from Visual Studio and Reflector, which is my normal code exploratory/analysis tool.