Recently, I've been running some scripts over git repositories to get a good sense of where change happens in large applications. It's a bit of a different thing to do. Often when people look for places to refactor, they think of the wildest areas of code: the places where methods are extremely long, intricate and scary. The question we should ask, though, is how often those complex areas change. If we get a sense of the change frequency across our codebases we can get a better sense of the ROI of particular refactoring efforts.
I wrote an article about this the other day and its up on StickyMinds. Over the next few weeks, I'm going to be digging further into this area. It seems like there is a lot we can learn from our version control histories.
