Concepts
The vocabulary for reading a change.
Four terms this site keeps using, each defined on its own page. They are the ideas an analysis has to compute before a report can say anything useful.
- Architecture diff
- An architecture diff shows a system's components and relationships before and after a change, so a pull request reads as a structural change, not edited lines.
- Change impact analysis
- Change impact analysis determines which parts of a system may behave differently because of a change, including the parts whose own source was never edited.
- Architecture drift
- Architecture drift is the gradual divergence between a system's intended structure and its real one, accrued through changes that each looked reasonable alone.
- Blast radius
- The blast radius of a code change is every component, flow and caller it reaches — most of which never appear in the diff, because their own code never changed.