Recently I came over a great visualization of imported classes by one class made by Mike Bostock with his Hierarchical Edge Bundling in D3. I wondered how hard it would be to reimplement this visualization with jQAssistant and Neo4j and show actual dependencies between Java types. So let’s have a look!
In software development, it’s all about knowledge – both technical and the business domain. But we software developers transfer only a small part of this knowledge into code. But code alone isn’t enough to get a glimpse of the greater picture and the interrelations of all the different concepts. There will be always developers that know more about some concept as laid down in source code. It’s important to make sure that this knowledge is distributed over more than one head…
There are multiple reasons for analyzing a version control system like your Git repository. See for example Adam Tornhill’s book “Your Code as a Crime Scene” or his upcoming book “Software Design X-Rays” for plenty of inspirations:
You can analyze knowledge islands, distinguish often changing code from stable code parts, identify code that is temporal coupled to other code.
Having the necessary data for those analyses in a Pandas DataFrame gives you many possibilities to quickly gain insights into the evolution of your software system in various ways…
I recently watched Michael Feathers’ talk about Strategic Code Deletion. Michael said (among other very good things) that if we want to delete code, we have to know the actual usage of our code.
In this post, I want to show you how you can very easily gather some data and create insights about unused code.
All the work before was just there to get a nice graph model that feels more natural. Now comes the analysis part: As mentioned in the introduction, we don’t only want the hotspots that signal that something awkward happened, but also
the trigger in our application of the hotspot combined with
the information about the entry point (e. g. where in our application does the problem happen) and
(optionally) the request that causes the problem (to be able to localize the problem)…