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

Visualize Organizational Friction

You’ve seen how individual hotspots turn into coordination magnets. However, cohesion is a multifaceted concept. Low cohesion can also appear as files that look deceptively simple, yet the emerging system behavior is anything but simple. The figure illustrates this issue.

Working on such a codebase, the moment you start to change a specific feature, you soon realize you have to modify three other files located in other packages and, of course, also update that shared service registry at the top level. That’s painful.

Strong dependencies spell enough trouble for an individual developer, but like most design issues, ...