Architecture as Code

Chapter 5. Architecture and Code-Level Metrics

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the 12th chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

Software architecture, when implemented, consists at least partially of source code, so it seems natural that architects should utilize some code-level metrics to learn about the macro- and micro-level structure of their code bases. Many teams wire metrics tools into their continuous integration pipelines to gather code-level metrics. However, merely gathering metrics does not create a fitness function—​remember, a fitness function must have an objective measure. Thus, while measuring key metrics is good, setting alarms for concerning ranges converts them into fitness functions (and therefore a feedback loop).

Software architects are often envious of other engineering disciplines that have entire branches of mathematics devoted to them. We don’t have anything nearly so powerful (yet–give us a few centuries and we’re sure to come up with some better measurements). However, we can leverage a few source-code-derived metrics to look at important aspects ...