Your Code as a Crime Scene

Apply Geographical Offender Profiling to Code

As I learned about geographical offender profiling in criminal psychology, I was struck by its possible applications to software. What if we could devise techniques that let us identify hotspots in large software systems? A hotspot analysis that could narrow down a large system to a few critical modules would be a big win in our profession.

Instead of speculating about potential design problems among million lines of code, geographical profiling would give us a prioritized lists of sections that need refactoring. It would also be dynamic, reflecting shifts in development focus over time.

Explore the Geography of Code

We need a geography of code. Despite its lack of physics, software is easy to visualize. ...