Your Code as a Crime Scene

Use Hotspots as a Guide

Similar to forensic psychology methods, code offender profiling techniques help us narrow down the search area within a codebase. In the next chapter, you’ll see the payoff on a large codebase where the hotspots make up a small percentage of the total code. That means we can focus our human expertise on smaller, more focused parts of the system. This opens up a number of possibilities:

• Prioritize design issues: I started this investigation because I needed a way to plan and prioritize improvements to a legacy system. Some of the suggested improvements were redesigns that cost several weeks of intense work. I had to ensure we spent time on improvements that actually helped future development efforts. Hotspots, indicating ...