Software Design X-Rays

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Chapter 6Spot Your System’s Tipping Point

Changes and new features often become increasingly difficult to implement over time, and many systems eventually reach a tipping point beyond which the codebase gets expensive to maintain. Since code decay is a gradual process, that tipping point is often hard to spot when you’re in the middle of the work on a large and growing codebase.

In this chapter we use social code analysis to make sense of large-scale systems by breaking them down into subsystems. The strategies you learn let you distill millions of lines of code, authored by hundreds of developers, into a set of specific and focused refactoring tasks. To ...