Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design

Decomposing a Problem Domain into Responsibilities

Commonality/variability analysis identifies my conceptual view (the commonality) and my implementation view (each particular variation). If I consider just the commonalities and the objects that use them, I can think about the problems in a different way—a decomposition of responsibilities.

In the Bridge pattern, for example, the pattern says to look at my problem domain as being composed of two different types of entities (abstractions and implementations). I therefore do not need to be limited by just doing object-oriented decomposition (that is, decomposing my problem domain into objects), I can also try decomposing my problem domain into responsibilities, if that is easier for me to do. I ...