Your Code as a Crime Scene

Analyze Complexity Trends in Hotspots

In a healthy codebase, you can add new features with successively less effort. Unfortunately, the reverse is often true: new features add complexity to an already tricky design. Eventually, the system breaks down, and development slows to a crawl.

This phenomenon was identified and formalized by Manny Lehman^[22] in a set of laws on software evolution. In his law of increasing complexity, Lehman states that “as an evolving program is continually changed, its complexity, reflecting deteriorating structure, increases unless work is done to maintain or reduce it.” (See On Understanding Laws, Evolution, and Conservation in the Large-Program Life Cycle [Leh80].)

You already know about hotspot analyses to identify ...