svengrav/powershell-module-analyzer

PowerShell Module Anaylzer

I developed this tool to analyze a PSModule I developed with my team for around 1 1/2 years. As the time went by, it become clear that the amount of technical debt has become very large and that we needed some way to analyze and identify critical hotspots in the tool.

Description

The PowerShell analyzer is a little prototype which is made for analyzing PowerShell module commands, parameters and function calls with the purpose to make technical debt visible.

• The analyzer will list all module functions, how often they are referenced by and referencing other functions.
• In addition the parameters and how often they are used are also considered.
• It calculates the stability index. This index describes from 0 (low) to 1 (high) how many other functions are relying on a specific function.
  • A high stability means, that a change of the function comes with high cost.

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HowTo

Startup Arguments

Parameter	Parameter (long)	Required	Description
-p	--path	true	Path to the PowerShell module
-d	--debug	true	Enables debug logging
-o	--outputdir	true	Path to a directory for the output of the analysis results
-n	--outputname	true	Identifier for the output

Output

The analyzer comes with multiple output formatters and is able to write the results as CSV, JSON or as Directed Graph Markup Language (dgml). The DGML Output helps you to visualize the module and shows the function dependencies as a graph.

CSV Compact

• All commands from the module and the basic stats are listed here.

Column	Description
Name	Name of the function.
Namespace	The namespace is the directory structure.
Invokes (Module)	Number of your own module functions that are executed by this function.
Invokes (External)	Number of external functions performed by this function. Such as "Get-Item".
InvokedBy	Number of invocations by other module functions.
Invokes (Unique)	Number of unique functions executed by this function. This means that each function is counted only once.
InvokedBy (Unique)	Number of your own unique module functions executed by this function.
StabilityIndex	Number of unique module functions that call this function.
LinesOfCode	Number of lines of code for this function.
Parameters	List of parameters and how often they are used.

CSV Invokes

• Lists all invocations between the module functions.

Column	Description
Name	Name of the function.
Namespace	The namespace is the directory structure.
Target (Module)	Number of your own module functions that are executed by this function.
Parameters	List of parameters that are used while executing the command.

DGML

• DGML is used to visualise all invocations between the module functions. This format is experimental and can be displayed e.g. with Visual Studio.