Software.Design.X-Rays.2018.3.pdf

Software Design X-Rays Fix Technical Debt with Behavioral Code Analysis Welcome, dear reader—I’m happy to have you here! Together we’ll dive into the fascinating field of evolving software systems to learn how behavioral code analysis helps us make better decisions. This is important because our average software project is much less efficient than it could be. The history of large-scale software systems is a tale of cost overruns, death marches, and heroic fights with legacy code monsters. One prominent reason is technical debt, which represents code that’s more expensive to maintain than it should be. Repaying technical debt is hard due to the scale of modern software projects; with hundreds of developers and a multitude of technologies, no one has a holistic overview. We’re about to change that. In this book, you learn a set of techniques that gives you an easily accessible overview of your codebase, together with methods to prioritize improvements based on the expected return on investment. That means you’ll be comfortable with picking up any large-scale codebase, analyzing it, and suggesting specific refactorings based on how the developers have worked with the code so far. Good code is as much about social design as it is about technical concerns. We reflect that by learning to uncover organizational inefficiencies, resolve coordination bottlenecks among teams, and assess the consequences of knowledge loss in your organization.