Classified Hotspots

To prioritize your hotspots, Empear Enterprise Edition employs algorithms that look at deeper change patterns in the analysis data, like development fragmentation and coupling to other entities. The rationale is that complicated code that changes often is more of a problem if:

1. The hotspot has to be changed together with several other modules.
2. The hotspot affects many different developers on different teams.

This algorithm allows us to rank and prioritize the hotspots in your codebase as illustrated in Fig. 30.

Fig. 30 An example of the quality guide.

The category 1 hotspots are the ones you want to focus on improving first. Improvements to those parts are likely to give you a large return on your investment.

Once you’ve addressed those hotspots, the category 2 hotspots become interesting as well. A category 2 hotspot is likely to be a real problem as well, albeit not as severe as category 1.

Shrink the Problem Space

The ranked list in the Quality Guide above is based on probabilities; We cannot guarantee that the code represents a true problem. But it’s likely to be one. And, best of all, that data is based on how your developers have worked with the system so far.

The main advantage of using the Quality Guide is that you’re able to narrow down improvements to a small part of the system. That in turn will give you more time to tackle larger issues once you’ve made these initial improvements.

So, how much of my codebase will be classified as category 1 hotspots? Well, the Quality Guide presents these metrics as well. Fig. 31 shows an example from the open-source project ASP.NET MVC.

Fig. 31 The quality guide minimizes the amount of code you need to look at.

As Fig. 31 shows, the category 1 hotspots (marked as red in the detailed chart) only make up 2.7 % of the codebase. That’s your big win; the quality guide minimizes the amount of code you need to look at and still be pretty sure that you get a real return on your investigative efforts.