The book is good at investigating design issues, but not good at solving them. Problems are exposed, but not discussed. The tools presented aren’t more than scripts that have to be executed manually and in the right sequence. There is no dashboard or some sort of continuous automated analysis to show the progress of the actions taken after the diagnosis.

The text emphasizes the approach of analyzing the history of changes in files based on version control logs, but I personally think that all diagnosis shown in the book can also be done by a static analysis tool like SonaQube.

Chapter 10, “Use Beauty as a Guiding Principle”, was the most relevant chapter for me. It really opened my mind to some aspects of programming. It made the book worth reading.