Real-World Software Development

Chapter 2. The Bank Statements Analyzer

The Challenge

The FinTech industry is really hot right now. Mark Erbergzuck realizes that he spends a lot of money on different purchases and would benefit from automatically summarizing his expenses. He receives monthly statements from his bank, but he finds them a bit overwhelming. He has tasked you with developing a piece of software that will automate the processing of his bank statements so he can get better insights into his finances. Challenge accepted!

The Goal

In this chapter, you will learn the foundations about good software development before learning more advanced techniques in the next few chapters.

You will start off by implementing the problem statement in one single class. You will then explore why this approach poses several challenges in terms of coping for changing requirements and maintenance of the project.

But do not worry! You will learn software design principles and techniques to adopt to ensure that the code you write meets these criteria. You will first learn about the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP), which helps develop software that is more maintainable, easier to comprehend, and reduces the scope for introducing new bugs. Along the way, you will pick up new concepts such as cohesion and coupling, which are useful characteristics to guide you about the quality of the code and software that you develop.

Note

This chapter uses libraries and features from Java 8 and above, including the new date and time ...