Software Design X-Rays

Prioritize Technical Debt with Hotspots

A hotspot is complicated code that you have to work with often. Hotspots are calculated by combining the two metrics we’ve explored:

1. Calculating the change frequency of each file as a proxy for interest rate

2. Using the lines of code as a simple measure of code complexity

The simplest way is to write a script that iterates through our table of change frequencies and adds the lines-of-code measure to each entry. We can also visualize our data to gain a better overview of where our hotspots are.

Let’s look at an example from the online gallery,^[17] where you see a visualization like the figure of a hotspot analysis on ASP.NET Core MVC. This codebase, from Microsoft, implements a model-view-controller (MVC) ...