Your Code as a Crime Scene

Foreword by Michael Feathers

It’s easy to look at code and think that there is nothing more than what we see. When we look at it, we see operators, identifiers, and other language structure, but that is all surface. We forget the depth. We spend so much time looking at the current state of the code that we forget its history and all of the forces that influenced it along its path toward the present.

We pay for this myopia. Many code changes are incredibly shortsighted, both in terms of our vision of what the code will be in the future, and the way that it got to be the way that it is.

Years ago, I was struck by the fact that we use version-control systems to keep track of our projects’ histories, but we hardly ever revert to previous versions. ...