Design It!

Reason About the Architecture

There is a finite amount of information we can keep in our heads at any given time. Over the years, software developers have created cheats to work around the limitations in our brains. One cheat is to turn problem solving into a massively parallel operation by collaborating with other humans. Another involves creating new, abstract concepts to represent chunks of knowledge. These tools—collaboration and abstraction—give us what we need to think through, analyze, and understand our architectures.

Abstractions help us focus on specific details at the expense of others. For example, an interface of a class in object-oriented programming describes the public methods but says nothing about how we should implement those ...