Modern Software Engineering: Doing What Works to Build Better Software Faster

9

Modularity

Modularity is defined as “the degree to which a system’s components may be separated and recombined, often with the benefit of flexibility and variety in use.”¹

I have been writing code for a long time, and from the beginning of my learning, even when writing simple video games in assembly language, modularity was lauded as important in the design of our code.

Yet, much of the code that I have seen—in fact most of the code that I have seen and maybe even some of the code that I have written—has been far from modular. At some point this changed for me. My code is always modular now; it has become an ingrained part of my style.

Modularity is of vital importance in managing the complexity of the systems that we create. Modern software ...