This article is part of a series about complexity metrics:

“This part of the codebase doesn’t feel right!”

This was Dave, your colleague developer, arguing in another never-ending meeting to rewrite a part of your company’s codebase. His arguments? Technical debt, high entropy, and the fear of the legacy system.

Our work, as developers, pushes us to take many decisions, from the architectural design to the code implementation. How do we make these decisions? Most of the time, we follow what “feel right”, that is, we rely on our intuition. It comes from our experience, an important source of information. But the same intuition can the source of many problems too. We’re humans, and we are subjects to many biases leading to wrong assumptions.