Your Code as a Crime Scene, Second Edition, 2nd Edition

Profile Targets in Test Code

While hotspots help us discover isolated maintenance bottlenecks, limiting our investigations to them would be a mistake. The unhealthy code in hotspots frequently spills over to other, potentially more distant, parts of the system.

These challenges are similar to the developments of geographical offender profiling. Early profiling implementations relied on the distance decay concept: criminals do not travel far from their homes to commit offenses. However, subsequent research suggests that we can improve the precision of the profile if we also consider opportunity structures. Within criminology, opportunity structures represent the attractiveness of potential targets. For example, a remote and poorly lit area might ...