Software Design X-Rays

Scale from Files to Systems

A code age analysis complements hotspots by helping you evolve your codebase in a direction where the system gets easier to maintain as you stabilize increasingly large parts of it. A failure to stabilize means that you need to maintain a working knowledge of those parts for the lifetime of the system.

Code age also guides code reorganizations toward the common closure principle, which is basically a specialization of the more general concept of cohesion applied on the package level. As a nice side effect, new programmers who join your organization experience less cognitive load, as they can now focus their learning efforts to specific parts of the solution domain with a minimum of distracting code.

The code age measure ...