Your Code as a Crime Scene

Evaluate Communication Costs

To reason about communication costs, we need to know who’s communicating with whom. The analysis model we’ll use is based on the idea that we can identify a main developer of each module.

We’ll define the main developer as the programmer who’s likely to know the most about the specific code. Because code knowledge isn’t easy to measure, we’ll use the number of contributed lines of code instead.

Like all heuristics, our metric has its flaws—in particular, since we measure something as multifaceted as programmer contributions. That doesn’t mean the results are useless; the metrics are there to support your decisions, not to make them for you. Your knowledge and expertise cannot be replaced by data.

So sure, using ...