Software Design X-Rays

Si vis pacem, para bellum.

Vegetius

Chapter 10An Extra Team Member: Predictive and Proactive Analyses

There’s a common belief in our industry that technical debt sneaks into a codebase over time. However, recent research disagrees and suggests that many problematic code smells are introduced upon creation, and future evolution of the code merely continues to dig that hole deeper. This means we need a way to catch potential problems early, ideally before they enter our master branch. In this chapter we explore preventive and predictive uses of behavioral code analysis. Such analysis information becomes like an extra team member that helps us by pointing out areas of the code in need of our attention.

We start by detecting early warnings on ...