> Set up metrics that tracked ratio of jQuery calls used per overall line of code and monitored that graph over time to make sure that it’s either staying constant or going down, not up.
I think this is wrong though. If you do a bit of trivial jquery to every element of a list, every time someone changes the “selected” element, then that could count as lots of jquery calls, even though there are few call-sites and not much to change to remove it.
I think the more concerning call would actually be some crazy selector, animation, and implicit state change which could be done in just a few calls that happen rarely.
With this in mind I think the right metric is #call-sites and not #calls: most of the time the effort required to refactor a jquery call away is not proportional to the number of times the function is called.
Right, I can visualize how that'd look from a top-level, but it'd be cool if they could share details. What sort of data did they pass along? Was this a standalone little dev tool on everyone's machine? Talk to a server?
Would love to know how this was done.