Episode 554: Adam Tornhill on Behavioral Code Analysis

Adam Tornhill, founder and CTO of CodeScene, joins host Giovanni Asproni to speak about behavioral code analysis. Behavioral code analysis is a set of practical techniques aimed at identifying patterns in how a development organization interacts with the codebase they’re building. It can be used to prioritize technical debt to maximize return on investment; to identify communication and team-coordination bottlenecks in code; to drive refactorings guided by data from how the system evolves; and to detect code quality problems before they become maintenance issues. The episode starts with a broad description of the techniques, providing some examples from real projects, and ends with suggestions on how to get started with applying them. During the conversation, Adam and Giovanni touch on a set of related topics, including the applicability of the techniques to legacy, green-, and brown-field projects; ethical and privacy implications; and the importance of context when judging code quality.

Related Episodes

• Episode 59: Static Code Analysis
• Episode 242: Dave Thomas on Innovating Legacy Systems
• Episode 295: Michael Feathers on Legacy Code
• Episode 331: Kevin Goldsmith on Architecture and Organizational Design
• Episode 363: Jonathan Boccara on Understanding Legacy Code

Related Links

• Better than Silver Bullets: A Milestone for Behavioral Code Analysis
• Code Maat
• Code Red: The Business Impact of Code Quality — A Quantitative Study of 39 Proprietary Production Codebases
• Conway’s Law
• Prioritizing Technical Debt as if Time and Money Matters
• Why I Write Dirty Code: Code Quality in Context
• Your Code as a Crime Scene
• Software Design X-Rays
• Adam’s Twitter: @AdamTornhill

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