I haven’t paid much attention to how the classes in my projects communicate with each other. Looking at the package structure, they all look good and well-organized. Then one day, I came across the article Your Code Structure and it made me to seriously think about re-validate my source code.

In the article, Edmund Kirwan used his tool, named Spoiklin Soice, to analyze the modules of JUnit from the early version to the latest one. The result was that as JUnit evolving, its classes had become more tangled and its structure had become a real mess (according to the graph).

This was really interesting because JUnit had been a widely known & used by almost all Java developers and it was developed by the lengedary Kent Beck. In the article, the latest version of JUnit, 4.11, had become really complex due to new features added into the library. I had always thought of JUnit as a powerful and well-tested tool and never paid attention to its structure and design ever since I used it. It could be the case that as time goes by, JUnit would become more and more difficult to extend and mantain due to its complexity.

Well, that was for JUnit, how about my projects? Spoiklin Soice is really interesting tool, I will use it to analyze them to see whether the structure is still controllable.

But what if we knew that the structure of a project had become too complex, what we could do to make it right again? Or there are any principle that we could follow and then keep everything in its right position?

Download and read more about Edmund’s work at his blog: http://edmundkirwan.com/general/spoiklin.html