97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

Chapter 76. The Single Responsibility Principle

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob)

ONE OF THE MOST FOUNDATIONAL PRINCIPLES OF GOOD DESIGN IS:

Gather together those things that change for the same reason, and separate those things that change for different reasons.

This principle is often known as the single responsibility principle, or SRP. In short, it says that a subsystem, module, class, or even a function, should not have more than one reason to change. The classic example is a class that has methods that deal with business rules, reports, and databases:

public class Employee {
    public Money calculatePay() ...
    public String reportHours() ...
    public void save() ...
}

Some programmers might think that putting these three functions together in the same class is perfectly appropriate. After all, classes are supposed to be collections of functions that operate on common variables. However, the problem is that the three functions change for entirely different reasons. The calculatePay function will change whenever the business rules for calculating pay do. The reportHours function will change whenever someone wants a different format for the report. The save function will change whenever the DBAs change the database schema. These three reasons to change combine to make Employee very volatile. It will change for any of those reasons. More importantly, any classes that depend upon Employee will ...