Your Code as a Crime Scene

Measure Temporal Coupling over Organizational Boundaries

The research findings from the Windows Vista study suggest that quality decreases with the number of programmers. It’s easy to see the link to Brooks’s law: more programmers implies more coordination overhead, which translates to more opportunities for misunderstandings and errors.

One way to highlight the severity of parallel work is by comparing the modules with most authors to the hotspots you identify. So let’s look back at the hotspot analysis we did in Chapter 4, ​Analyze Hotspots in Large-Scale Systems​:

As you can see, the AbstractEntityPersister—the class with the most programmers—is ...