Alexander von Zitzewitz

Books in this wiki: Software Architecture Metrics (ch. 9)

Background

Creator of the Sonargraph tool suite and researcher in software structure and maintainability. Brings an empirical, metrics-heavy perspective rooted in long-term study of real codebases. His work focuses on preventing structural erosion in large systems through measurable feedback loops.

Core Positions

• Cyclic dependencies are the most toxic structural antipattern — they make codebases equivalent to a Big Ball of Mud and must be eliminated with zero tolerance at the package/namespace level
• 80% of nontrivial software systems exceeding 100,000 LoC end as Big Balls of Mud without active structural discipline — structural erosion is the default outcome, not the exception
• Structural metrics (Propagation Cost, Relative Cyclicity, Maintainability Level) provide objective fitness function thresholds that can be enforced in CI/CD; without them, architectural decline is invisible until too late
• Change history metrics (Code Churn, Number of Changes, Number of Authors) identify hotspots where structural investment yields the highest return

Books

Software Architecture Metrics — Software Architecture Metrics (2022)

Ch. 9: "Using Software Metrics to Ensure Maintainability." Provides a comprehensive framework of structural metrics — ACD/CCD/Propagation Cost, Relative Cyclicity, Structural Debt Index, Maintainability Level — with concrete fitness function thresholds. Introduces LCOM4 and Component Rank (PageRank for classes). Six golden rules for structural governance. Grounded in data from large-scale real-world system analysis.