Object-Oriented Design Heuristics

Preface

In the process of teaching object-oriented analysis, design, and implementation to several thousand students, it became clear to me that the industry was in serious need of guidelines to help developers make proper decisions. Since 1987 I have scoured the literature in search of productivity and complexity metrics that can be applied at different levels of development to improve an object-oriented application. I added my own “homemade” guidelines to those found in the literature and came up with approximately 60 guidelines, several of which are tongue-in-cheek yet no less important than any others. I briefly considered calling them the “Sixty Golden Rules of OOA/D,” but I recalled Dykstra's legendary “Goto Considered Harmful” paper, which ...