The most important factor in software decay

Do you have big balls of mud? Here’s an experiment to amaze your friends. You probably listen to music on…

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Who’s afraid of the big bad class?

Ferocious, guzzling black holes of the software universe, super-massive classes result from run-away positive feedback: the class grows so huge…

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Structural contingency (part one)

Order, in mathematics, matters. Take two functions, f and g, and compose them, thus applying them to an argument as…

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What’s the opposite of duplication?

“If you see the same code structure in more than one place,” writes Martin Fowler in his wonderful, Refactoring book,…

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Dependency inversion: the structure logarithm

Re-examining benefits. Through the corroded dripping pipes of transitive dependencies, ripple effects gush. Programmers sometimes spend arduous days clambering down…

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How many classes and packages should you have?

Real world experience. Once upon a time there lived a family of programming bears. Each morning mammy bear, daddy bear…

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Going Dawkins on god objects

Meet the enemy. Steaming stinking jungle crushing all about you, insects infesting the air, strange grunts shuddering in the foliage,…

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How deep is your code?

Dependency tuples. Picture your code. Picture all those functions on which there are no source-code dependencies. That might sound odd:…

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The three greatest paragraphs ever written on encapsulation

Definition. Encapsulation isn’t sexy. It’s the chartered accounting of software design. Functional Java programming? Formula freakin’ one. Hybrid cloud computing?…

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