Books
- Your Code as a Crime Scene (2nd Edition, 2024) - Applies forensic psychology techniques to codebases: hotspot analysis, temporal coupling, geographic profiling of commits
- Software Design X-Rays (2018) - Prioritizing technical debt using behavioral data, identifying architectural issues, connecting code quality to business outcomes
Key Concepts
- Hotspot analysis: Files that change frequently AND have high complexity = biggest risks
- Temporal coupling: Files that always change together reveal hidden dependencies
- Code churn + complexity: Predicting where bugs will emerge
- Organizational analysis: Mapping team structure to code ownership, finding coordination bottlenecks
- Change frequency vs. code age: Identifying code that should be stable but isn't
Free Tools
- code-maat - Open source CLI tool (Clojure/Java) that mines version-control data for all the analyses in the books
- maat-scripts - Python scripts to post-process and visualize code-maat output (teaching-oriented)
Talks & Podcasts
- "Treat Your Code as a Crime Scene" - GOTO 2016 (YouTube), also presented at SREcon 2024
- Software Engineering Radio Episode 554 - Full interview on behavioral code analysis
- "Prioritizing Technical Debt as if Time and Money Matters" - Philly ETE 2021
- "The Critical Safeguards for AI-Assisted Coding" - Analyzing 100K+ AI-driven refactorings from real codebases
- CodeScene thought leadership talks
Commercial Tool
- CodeScene - Productized version of all these ideas. Has a free community edition.
Workshop
- Fix Technical Debt with Behavioural Code Analysis - DDD Academy
Starting Point
The 2nd edition of "Your Code as a Crime Scene" is the most comprehensive single resource. The GOTO 2016 talk on YouTube is a solid free appetizer to see if the ideas resonate before committing to the book.