Your Code as a Crime Scene

Chapter 7Treat Your Code As a Cooperative Witness

In Part I, we looked at how to detect hotspots in code. You learned to pass quick judgments on the hotspots you found. You also learned how to measure their complexity trends to determine whether the code was improving or getting worse over time. This is the ideal starting point. The next step is to look at the bigger picture.

In this part of the book, we’ll transition from looking at individual modules to analyzing complete software architectures. We’ll evaluate how well the high-level design of our system supports the evolution of our code: is our architecture more of a hindrance than a help?

We’ll still use hotspots, though. The techniques you’re about to learn identify high-level structural ...