Software Design for Flexibility: How to Avoid Programming Yo…

Software Design for Flexibility: How to Avoid Programming Yo…

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Software Design for Flexibility: How to Avoid Programming Yourself into a Corner

As software developers, we’ve all been there – stuck with a codebase that’s rigid, inflexible, and resistant to change. We’ve programmed ourselves into a corner, and now even the smallest modification requires a Herculean effort. But it doesn’t have to be this way. By prioritizing flexibility in our software design, we can create systems that are adaptable, maintainable, and scalable.

The Cost of Inflexibility

Inflexible software design can have severe consequences. It can lead to:

  1. Maintenance nightmares: Simple changes become complex, time-consuming, and expensive.
  2. Limited scalability: The system can’t handle increased traffic, data, or user demands.
  3. Inability to adapt: New features or changing requirements are difficult or impossible to implement.
  4. Technical debt: The codebase becomes a tangled mess, making it hard to understand and modify.

Principles of Flexible Software Design

To avoid these pitfalls, follow these principles:

  1. Separation of Concerns (SoC): Divide the system into independent components, each responsible for a specific task. This allows for easier modification and replacement of individual components without affecting the entire system.
  2. Modularity: Break down the system into smaller, self-contained modules that can be developed, tested, and maintained independently.
  3. Loose Coupling: Minimize dependencies between components, allowing them to interact without being tightly bound together.
  4. High Cohesion: Ensure that each component or module has a single, well-defined responsibility and is self-contained.
  5. Abstraction: Use abstract interfaces and APIs to define interactions between components, making it easier to change or replace implementations without affecting other parts of the system.
  6. Dependency Injection: Pass dependencies into components rather than hardcoding them, making it easier to switch between different implementations.
  7. Testing: Write comprehensive tests to ensure that changes don’t break existing functionality.

Design Patterns for Flexibility

Several design patterns can help you achieve flexibility in your software design:

  1. Factory Pattern: Creates objects without specifying the exact class, allowing for easy substitution of different implementations.
  2. Strategy Pattern: Defines a family of algorithms, encapsulates each one, and makes them interchangeable.
  3. Observer Pattern: Allows objects to be notified of changes to other objects without having a tight coupling between them.
  4. Decorator Pattern: Dynamically adds additional behavior to an object without modifying its underlying structure.

Best Practices for Flexible Software Development

In addition to following principles and design patterns, adopt these best practices:

  1. Keep it simple: Avoid over-engineering and focus on simplicity and elegance.
  2. Use agile methodologies: Iterate and refine your design as you go, rather than trying to create a perfect design upfront.
  3. Code reviews: Regularly review code to ensure it meets flexibility and maintainability standards.
  4. Refactor mercilessly: Continuously refactor your code to keep it clean, modular, and adaptable.

Conclusion

By prioritizing flexibility in your software design, you can create systems that are adaptable, maintainable, and scalable. Remember to follow principles like separation of concerns, modularity, and loose coupling, and apply design patterns like the factory, strategy, and observer patterns. By adopting these best practices, you’ll avoid programming yourself into a corner and create software that can evolve and grow with your needs.

Customers say

Customers find the book provides a number of strategies for designing software and appreciate its enlightening content, with one customer noting it offers a different way of looking at things. Moreover, the book receives positive feedback for its readability. However, the writing quality receives mixed reviews, with several customers describing it as having the clarity of a poorly written academic paper. Additionally, the documentation receives mixed feedback, with one customer noting it provides implementation details while another finds it lacking in detail.

9 reviews for Software Design for Flexibility: How to Avoid Programming Yo…

  1. Alin Soare –

    It takes a long time to make a good book
    I have just become the happy owner of this book. I have been waiting for this book for many years. Initially I bought it from amazon.com on the 9th of March and the book got stuck in NYC, probably shipment is blocked due to pandemic. I re-bought it from amazon.fr and I received it in less than 1 week. When I re-bought it from amazon.fr there were still 14 items and the next day there was none.This book presents the details of the course 6.945, “Adventures in Advanced Symbolic Programming” taught by Sussman since about 2005. I asked Sussman in 2015 when he was going to publish the course he was teaching and he answered ” << I don't expect the book to be finished in less than a few years. It takes a long time to make a good book.>> ( oct. 2015). I am already familiar with the concepts from the book, as I worked with them using the online materials but now I am really happy to learn the details.For those who consider lisp as an impediment to understanding: this book is about advanced concepts of computation, not about scheme. In the same way SICP is about basic concepts of computation, not about scheme. The concepts can be used everywhere in programming. Actually, software systems are usually written in C, so in practical implementation you will redicover many times the concepts in book implemented in C.

  2. Russ Tokuyama –

    A different way to look at things
    This is a follow-on to SICP and like SICP gives a different way to look at things thanks to the features of Scheme. However, the ideas are more important than the specific programming language. It provides a different way of looking at things.

  3. Sam Ritchie –

    Lovely tour through combinators, generics and other tools for building large robust FP systems
    I’m two chapters in, but I feel comfortable writing a preliminary review, as I’ve been carefully reading and re-implementing GJS’s “scmutils” library for the last 8 months, and many of the ideas in the book first few during the development of that library.It’s extremely difficult to build large systems that don’t calcify at scale, and that are pleasurable to extend. The first half of the book discusses techniques like combinators, generics and multiple dispatch that have found their way into many mainstream libraries — but the book heads off of my deep end, into propagators and techniques for embedding interpreters and compilers into large systems as a way of breaking out of the ceremonial abstraction boundaries imposed by the original language choice.Guy Steele (in the introduction) calls this a masterclass, and it really feels this way. The ideas the authors present really are in the air here in 2021. The book deserves a companion reference pointing out all of the more familiar open source libraries and languages where these patterns appear.Buy this book! GJS and Hanson nudge you at the end of each section to LEAVE and go try these patterns out in your own code. This is all deeply helpful stuff. I’ll update with more insight as I proceed with my more careful read through the rest of the book.

  4. Biped Phill –

    More about flexibility than not programming yourself into a corner
    This book will not be a seminal work. But it advances the pop lit in several ways: by elaborating the analogy of “served spaces vs servant spaces”, by defending “evolvable” design, and especially by recognizing “additive programming” as natural and positive.  I love it when the rustic ways are restored to respectability.  (Martin Fowler’s CQRS is another example.)  It is principally an assemblage of course material on some interesting techniques, not an exposition on not-programming-yourself-into-a-corner. For example, the book unabashedly uses “nonstandard” GNU features, but my Rule No.1 for not programming myself into a corner would be “avoid the GNU compiler extensions”.  Another clue is a footnote in the Propagation chapter that says, essentially, “oops this global variable is going to impede reuse and extension, but it’s too late for us to change it now,” which flunks the bar set by the very second sentence of Guy Steele’s foreword.I found it worth reading thoughtfully. I was rewarded by subtle programmer jokes here and there. I noticed a playful stunt in their TeX-craft, too. The well is deep and I look forward to some more unexpected treats on a second reading, much later.Overall, I recommend this book, as fun and enlightening, with the proviso that (as neither a Schemer nor a mathematician) I am not worthy to recommend it.

  5. Ian Thomas –

    Full of Novel and Useful Insights to Software Design
    Provides a number of strategies for designing software, with why to use, and their inspiration. Then each chapter provides implementation details. Code is in Scheme, but the ideas are conveyed in a way that makes them transferable to any language.

  6. ClausVonDerKueste –

    Wer SICP und den darin enthaltenen MIT-Scheme-Code verstanden hat bzw. sich durch den etwas provokanten Untertitel animiert fühlt, kauft dieses neue Buch SDFF unbesehen. Wer noch nie etwas von SICP gehört oder sich die Finger dran verbrannt hat, sollte weiter seine Bahnen ziehen.Die Botschaft von SDFF ist die “Additive Softwareentwicklung”: Adaptation nur durch Addition neuer Softwarekomponenten. Die ursprünglichen Funktionen bleiben dabei unberührt. Ich habe jetzt 51 Seiten (Ch. 1-3) durchgearbeitet und die Programme nach Julia reinterpretiert bzw transpiliert. In dem Buch werden viele gute Ideen präsentiert, die zur eigenen Inspiration sehr geeignet sind.Von meiner anfänglichen 5-Sternebewertung ziehe ich inzwischen einen ‘*’ ab. Dafür gibt es verschiedene Gründe: 1) die Skripte sind unvollständig und in MIT/GNU-Scheme geschrieben. Die Unvollständigkeit ist eine Stolperschwelle für Novizen. Das scheint aber von den Autoren so gewollt zu sein. MIT/GNU-Scheme ist aber schon selbst eine nicht sehr gebräuchliche Scheme-Implementation. Zwar kann man für Windows-OS einen lauffähigen Dockercontainer laden. Aber das ist ein etwas umständlicher Umweg, den ich vermeiden wollte. Ich habe mir angewöhnt, die MIT/GNU-Skripte entweder direkt nach Julia zu übersetzen oder quasi in einem Zwischenschritt in Racket auszuprobieren. Racket bietet eine äußerst entwicklerfreundliche Testumgebung und Dokumentation.2) es gibt keinen Github-account zum Download der Software und zur Rückmeldung der Community an die Autoren3) die Autoren sind schwierig bzw garnicht zu erreichen; Anfragen bezüglich errata-Listen bleiben unbeantwortet.4) Kapitel 3 ist unnötig schwierig, weil visuelle Hilfen (wie Funktionsdiagramme) fehlen und die gewählten Begriffe verwirrend sind; zB. werden mit “conventional” die hier ungebräuchlichen Imperial-Einheiten bezeichnet, wärend der Begriff der SI-Einheit garnicht vorkommt.5) Übliche Methode der Softwaretechnik insbesondere der objektorienten Programmierung nicht bzw unzulänglich erwähnt werden (zumindest nicht in den von mir gelesenen Kapiteln).Letzterer Punkt erscheint mir der größte Mangel. Es fehlt die Einordnung in die Ansätze und Methoden der OOP. Die oben erwähnte ‘Additive’ Softwareentwicklung folgt letztendlich Bertrand Meyer’s ‘Open-Close-Prinzip’. Immerhin sind die relevanten Pionierarbeiten (wie zB. CLOS, Metaobject Protocol, AOP) auf Fußnoten auf S.88) erwähnt.Fazit: Ein interessantes Buch für Leute, die auch den Umweg über MIT-Scheme nicht scheuen.

  7. avidreader –

    I loved this book – very strong words from me – I’ve been programming for 56 years – and wish I’d got these ideas earlier! The book not only provides lots of techniques but has an overarching philosophy that makes it truly valuable.I think, however, that the book forgets documentation – if your program is flexible, can you remember how it works when you need to flex it? I wonder how was the book written? – it’s documenting their ideas and showing off code, sure, but how did they do this reliably (aka literate programming)? It also doesn’t mention open source, repositories (github et al) and other practical tools to help flexibility in the real world. If a program is flexible, what about version control? How do you version the program’s data to be upwards compatible (eg you upgrade the ‘flexible’ program and yet it then won’t read all its old data formats…. you need more than just flexible programs!) And nothing about errors – when a flexible program is flexed, how do you know it is still correct? Well, minor quibbles. This book is so exciting, spot-on, and well-written it leaves you wanting more.Did I say it’s written using LISP (Scheme), though if you don’t know LISP you can easily skip the details and just get the broad ideas. Yeh, you could do all this in Javascript if you insist. Of course, if you can’t cope with LISP then you’re not a real programmer anyway.If this is Volume 2 of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP), I can’t wait till volume 3, 4, ….

  8. Edward Kenworthy –

    This is a book of sound software engineering (in the proper sense of software development as engineering).Unsurprisingly the examples are provided in Scheme. Unsurprising both because Sussman is one of the creators of Scheme and because the patterns described are impossible to implement in non-Lisp languages, for example C++ or Java.

  9. Oli –

    All examples are in Scheme, if you don’t understand that language you’re not going to get much out of this book

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