Treat Your Code as a Crime Scene

We'll never be able to understand a software system from a single snapshot of the code. Instead we need to understand how the code evolved and how the people who work on it are organized. We also need strategies for finding bottlenecks and technical debt impairing our productivity, as well as uncovering hidden dependencies between code and people. Where do you find such strategies if not within the field of criminal psychology?

This session starts with a crash course in offender profiling before we quickly move on to adopt those principles to software development. You'll learn how easily obtained version-control data lets you uncover the behavior and patterns of the development organization. This language-neutral approach lets you prioritize the parts of your system that benefit the most from improvements so that you can balance short- and long-term goals guided by data. The presentation will change how you view code. Promise.