Book Review: Software Design X-Rays
23 Feb 2025Technical debt is a reality for every software developer. We all know some “dark corners” of our codebases - those problematic areas we dread touching. But some challenges are less obvious. This is where Software Design X-Rays by Adam Tornhill comes in.
A Different Perspective on Complexity
What makes this book stand out is its behavioral analysis approach to software complexity. Instead of relying on traditional static analysis or architectural metrics, Tornhill focuses on how teams interact with the code over time. This shift provides insights that feel closer to the real-world challenges of working with evolving codebases.
Key Insights
Tornhill introduces data-driven techniques to analyze and improve software design, including:
- Identifying “code of high interest rates” – files that accumulate technical debt at an unsustainable rate
- Uncovering temporal coupling – how different parts of a system change together, revealing hidden dependencies
- Analyzing code at multiple levels – from individual files to components and even microservices
- Creating “knowledge maps” – understanding how expertise is spread across teams and the risks of “code diffusion”
Beyond uncovering issues, the book also provides actionable strategies to address them and explores predictive measures to identify potential hot spots before they grow out of control.
Final Thoughts
If you’re serious about understanding technical debt and software complexity, this book is a must-read. It provides practical tools to uncover hidden design problems and helps teams make smarter, data-driven refactoring decisions. Highly recommended!