assess-quality

Assess Mendix Project Quality

This skill guides a comprehensive quality assessment of a Mendix project, evaluating it against established best practices across naming, security, performance, maintainability, architecture, and more.

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when:

• A user asks to evaluate the quality of a Mendix project
• Reviewing a project against best practices before go-live
• Performing a health check or audit on an existing application
• Onboarding onto a project and wanting to understand its quality posture

Assessment Workflow

Step 1: Run Automated Analysis

Run the automated linter and report to get a baseline score:

# connect to the project and build a full catalog (needed for deep analysis)
mxcli -p app.mpr -c "refresh catalog full"

# run the linter (41 rules: MDL, SEC, QUAL, ARCH, design, CONV series)
mxcli lint -p app.mpr

# generate the scored best practices report
mxcli report -p app.mpr --format markdown

The report covers 6 categories with scores: Naming, Security, Quality, Architecture, Performance, Design.

Step 2: Explore Project Structure

Use catalog queries to understand the project's shape:

-- Overview of project size and structure
show structure depth 2

-- Key metrics
select module_name, count(*) from CATALOG.entities GROUP by module_name
select module_name, count(*) from CATALOG.microflows GROUP by module_name
select module_name, count(*) from CATALOG.pages GROUP by module_name

-- Complexity metrics (McCabe/Sigrid-style)
select qualified_name, cyclomatic_complexity
from CATALOG.microflows
where cyclomatic_complexity > 10
ORDER by cyclomatic_complexity desc

-- Large microflows
select qualified_name, activity_count
from CATALOG.microflows
where activity_count > 15
ORDER by activity_count desc

Step 2b: Architecture & Dependency-Graph Analysis

mxcli models the project as a dependency graph and exposes topological analyses on top of it — god nodes, coupling, cohesion, communities, centrality, cycles, and layering. These answer questions catalog metrics can't: what's central, what's tangled, what belongs together.