Software Design X-Rays

Toward Team-Oriented Measures

In this chapter we climbed the abstraction ladder and analyzed the evolution of complete subsystems. Since the principles for hotspots and complexity trends are orthogonal to the data they operate on, we get to use the same concepts on all levels of detail, be it architectural components, files, or functions. This means you now have the techniques to make sense of a codebase, no matter the scale and size of it.

The way you slice and dice your architectural boundaries varies depending on your architectural style. For example, in a technically oriented architecture like MVC you want to represent each layer as a boundary, whereas you’d specify each microservice as its own logical component. (We’ll discuss both cases—with ...