Table of Contents for

Your Code as a Crime Scene

From Individual Hotspots to Architectures

In this chapter, we started to look inside modules. You learned that the visual shape of code tells us about its complexity. You saw how analyzing indentation provides fast and language-neutral results. We can use indentation to measure and compare complexity across our codebase.

By calculating complexity trends over a range of historical revisions, we get enough information to quickly judge the direction hotspots are going.

Now that we’ve finished this chapter, we’ve taken the concept of hotspot analysis in software development full circle. We learned how to analyze small systems, such as Code Maat, and large-scale codebases, such as Hibernate. We drilled into individual modules to reveal their internal complexity.

We learned that a hotspot analysis is an ideal first entry point into a new system. Now’s the time to go from individual modules to high-level designs and architectures. In the next part of the book, you’ll learn to find patterns in how multiple hotspots evolve together. This information lets you pass similar judgments on the architecture of your system, not just individual modules. Let’s dissect our architectures!