Software Design X-Rays

Your Code Is Still a Crime Scene

My previous book, Your Code as a Crime Scene [Tor15], introduced concepts from forensic psychology as a means to understand the evolution of large-scale codebases. Forensics was a metaphor drawn from where it all started. Years ago I did a geographical offender profile on a series of burglaries in my hometown, Malmö, Sweden.^[138] Such offender profiles look for patterns in the distribution of connected crime scenes, which are then used to focus investigations on the areas of interest. These forensic hotspots, as shown in the figure, are all about probabilities, just like the hotspots we detect in code.

At the same ...