Your Code as a Crime Scene

Chapter 8Detect Architectural Decay

In the previous chapter, you learned how temporal coupling detects hidden dependencies in your system. Now it’s time to learn how to perform an analysis of temporal coupling on your code.

In this chapter, we’ll analyze two systems of different sizes. The smaller project shows how temporal coupling can still give us fresh insights into the design even when we’re very familiar with the code. The larger project shows how to detect architectural decay so that we can make improvements early in the process. You’ll also see that the structures you’re working with aren’t always aligned with the official architecture.

Let’s see how information-rich the change patterns in a system can be for our analysis.