Software Design X-Rays

Evaluate Hotspots with Complexity Trends

We can find out how severe a potential problem is via a complexity trend analysis, which looks at the accumulated complexity of the file over time. The trend is calculated by fetching each historic version of a hotspot and calculating the code complexity of each historic revision.

You will soon learn more about how complexity is calculated, but let’s start with a specific example from our top hotspot. As you see in the figure, ControllerActionInvokerTest.cs has become much more complicated recently.^[21]

The trend tells the story of our hotspot. We see that it grew dramatically back in May 2016. Since then ...