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 to 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 a million lines of code, geographical profiling would give us a prioritized list of areas needing refactoring. It would also be dynamic information, reflecting shifts in development focus over time.
Explore the Geography of Code
Before we can reason about hotspots, we need a geography of our code. Despite its ...
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