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Code Proximity Conjecture

#development #tips #heuristics

Let us call this heuristic the Code Proximity Conjecture

The probability of a documenting artifact (e.g. documentation, product roadmap, tickets, TODO task) being up to date is inversely proportional to the squared distance (in terms of hops by URL or files) of the artifact from the main code repository.

In other words:

Probability of being up to date, p, is proportional to 1 divided by the distance of the documentation artifact, distance, from the code repository, raised to the exponent 2.

Where p is the probability of the documenting artifact being up to date, and distance is the hop count by URL or file to the artifact relative to the main code repository.