Which maintenance metric tracks how often code changes over time, indicating churn?

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Multiple Choice

Which maintenance metric tracks how often code changes over time, indicating churn?

Explanation:
Tracking how often code changes over time is a maintenance metric known as code churn. It measures edits, additions, and deletions across the codebase within a given period. This helps teams gauge the ongoing maintenance burden: high churn often points to unstable areas due to evolving requirements, design issues, or frequent bug fixes, and it can indicate where refactoring, additional tests, or clearer interfaces might reduce future changes. Other metrics look at different aspects of code quality. Cyclomatic complexity focuses on the number of independent paths in a program, which relates to testing and understandability rather than change frequency. Coupling assesses how tightly modules depend on each other, and cohesion looks at how tightly related the responsibilities inside a module are; neither tracks how often code changes over time.

Tracking how often code changes over time is a maintenance metric known as code churn. It measures edits, additions, and deletions across the codebase within a given period. This helps teams gauge the ongoing maintenance burden: high churn often points to unstable areas due to evolving requirements, design issues, or frequent bug fixes, and it can indicate where refactoring, additional tests, or clearer interfaces might reduce future changes.

Other metrics look at different aspects of code quality. Cyclomatic complexity focuses on the number of independent paths in a program, which relates to testing and understandability rather than change frequency. Coupling assesses how tightly modules depend on each other, and cohesion looks at how tightly related the responsibilities inside a module are; neither tracks how often code changes over time.

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