Solidifying your Design

When someone asks me how to design and build a system full of interlocking, moving parts, I just point them at SOLID. These bad boys don’t just apply to your code. They should be an integral part of your architecture too.

Here’s how.

Single Responsibility Principle

The SRP isn’t just a guide to code. It explains a lot about life. It’s the reason your favourite coffee house produces far better coffee than your local Chinese restaurant. It tells you why Wal*Mart’s bicycles are awful. And it’s the answer to building good modules.

Solve one problem.

Let’s put it this way: at all levels of your application, components should be expressive and easily named. They should do one thing and tell you what it is. For example, you might have a method called renderProduct in a view named ProductView, on a web page called Products, on a site named Buy My Freakin’ Stuff. It’s a bit contrived, but you can see how at each level, we’re solving a single problem. This extends well into a service-oriented architecture too, where each service has a single responsibility, albeit larger than the modules inside it.

Open-Closed Principle

I’ve started rephrasing the OCP as “don’t change, replace”. When changing the behaviour of existing interfaces, wrap them, don’t modify them directly until you’re sure everything using the interface can handle it. This is actually far more important at the design level. Your interfaces aren’t just code, y’know. You have UIs (user interfaces) and APIs (application programming interfaces) too. You need to ensure that the behaviour doesn’t change, not just for third parties but also for internal services. If you want to change it, that’s great, but do it in a few steps: wrap it, change the callers, delegate the old to the new, change them all back and finally remove the wrapper. Even better, make versioning explicit, and let clients access either version, removing the need for a temporary endpoint. Simples, right?

Liskov Substitution Principle

This one’s fairly easy: if you change the implementation of an endpoint, keep the behaviour. Just as I should be able to swap out an array list for a linked list with no change to my end result (though the performance characteristics may change), Twitter reimplementing their public timeline API should never require third-party application developers (or their own in-house devs) to change their apps. This also applies to user interfaces: experience changes should ideally never be made as a result of technical changes, but should be judged on their own merits. This might, of course, provoke a technical modification as part of the work.

Interface Segregation Principle

Quite often, and especially in business-focused applications, software is built for many different kinds of customers. In the financial domain in which I currently work, we have the “buy side” and the “sell side”, as well as our in-house support team, who administer the product. And yet the software is delivered as a single web site with different pages and an entirely different look and feel depending upon your account credentials. Why?

This entire model is insane. We want four or five applications: the buy side, the sell side, administration, a login page and maybe even some kind of API which the different applications can use as a common meeting point.

Dependency Inversion Principle

When applied to applications or components, DI simply means defining and exposing a public interface (like an API), and then using specifically that and only that to interact. This means you should not be communicating informally using, for example, a database. If you really want your individual modules to be black boxes, no other module should even be aware that they use a database, let alone how to access it. By extension, sharing a data store at all is a terrible idea, as it creates a high degree of coupling between two things, going against the entire concept of modularisation.

That’s all, folks.

That’s all five. There’s obviously more that plays into building a maintainable architecture, but hopefully this will be helpful. The realisation has definitely improved the way I think about software design.