Your Code as a Crime Scene

Chapter 1Welcome!

The central idea of Your Code as a Crime Scene is that we’ll never be able to understand complex, large-scale systems just by looking at a single snapshot of the code. As you’ll see, when we limit ourselves to what’s visible in the code, we miss a lot of valuable information. Instead we need to understand both how the system came to be and how the people working on it interact with each other. In this book, you’ll learn to mine that information from the evolution of your codebase.

Once you’ve worked through this book, you’ll be able to examine a large system and immediately get a view of its health—that is, its health from both a technical perspective and from the development practices that led to the code you see today. You’ll ...