Software development might well be the most challenging task humanity ever attempted. As systems scale up, they also become increasingly complex, expensive to maintain, and difficult to reason about. We can always write more tests, try to refactor, and even fire up a debugger to understand complex coding constructs. That’s a great starting point, but you can do so much better.

Take inspiration from forensic psychology techniques to understand and improve existing code. Visualize codebases via a geographic profile from commit data to find development hotspots, prioritize technical debt, and uncover hidden dependencies. Get data and develop strategies to make the business case for larger refactorings. Detect and fix organizational problems from the vantage point of the software architecture to remove bottlenecks for the teams.

The original Your Code as a Crime Scene from 2014 pioneered techniques for understanding the intersection of people and code. This new edition reflects a decade of additional experience from hundreds of projects. Updated techniques, novel case studies, and extensive new material adds to the strengths of this cult classic.

Change how you view software development and join the hunt for better code!

Book cover featuring a magnifying glass over circuits. The circuits are in blue outside of the glass, and under the glass are red.

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