Do you work with micro-services? You can now compare their hotspots! Just run c/show-hotspot-cluster in a directory containing them. You will obtain a single hotspot graph.

We saw already that hotspots can bring us to code with problems. You can run code-compass' c/show-hotspots on any Git project. It may happen, though, that you have to put your architect hat on and look at an orchestration. In that case you may want to compare hotspots of multiple projects. For example, this applies to micro-services. You have a number of projects that collaborate to bring value. Often many teams maintain them. And some teams follow great coding practices and others follow some poorer ones. It could be useful to compare these projects to spot problems early.

Our hotspots analysis would be great for that, but it takes only one repository! What to do?

We can extend it! The idea is to loop over the repositories and accumulate one big analyses. The implementation is a bit hacky, but check out how it looks.

I just run c/show-hotspot-cluster and pick a directory containing repositories. I pick a starting date for the analysis. After waiting a little, I get a hotspot analysis that contains all the repositories. You can see that I can now compare the size of the projects. And I can see the modules that are most exercised.

Again this is incredible useful to keep track of what is going on in the overall code base.

Also often projects share the same structure. For example, projects following Domain Driven Design will have a domain and an adapter directory. If your project follows a standard, you may discover hotspots in a directory that is common to many projects. That could be a sign that many teams are working independently on the same changes. You could use this insight to get in touch with other teams and join efforts.

All in all, this is also useful for comparing projects design. I could find out in one gaze that some projects had too much functionality compared to others. That is a good call to action to reshuffle responsibilities around, and keep things small.

Note that you can also specify a repos-cluster.txt file in the directory with your projects. If you list the names of the projects in there, c/show-hotspot-cluster will pick only those. This is handy if you keep all your projects in a single directory.

This is it! You will be able to see micro-services and compare components. Just run c/show-hotspot-cluster on the container directory and you will get your comprehensive view.

Happy comprehension!