Entropy and Evolution of a Codebase goes well with Your Application is on Fire:
If you imagine the modules in a codebase like cells in a Game of Life automaton, you could see cells fading from healthy blue to sickly red, then transmitting their disease elsewhere. Very occasionally, you’ll see a cell or cluster of cells brightening to health as a developer restructures that area. Mostly, the codebase will decay until it must be discarded or rewritten.Michael Nygard reflects on changes that increase and decrease the entropy of an application, what tends to introduce those changes, arrives at this wonderful metaphor for the thinking about the health of an application over time, and then offers several ways to manage entropy in a codebase. This is one that will stick in your head for a while.
If you haven’t read Michael Nygard’s Release It, you’re missing out on a lot of great stories and useful ideas on how to maintain production software.
