simplicity

Practice 4

Decouple Your Teams

Any organization that designs a system (broadly defined) will produce a design that mirrors the organization’s communication structure.

Melvin Conway1968

Over the years we developers have learned a few things about writing code. We’ve even developed a series of intuitions, like these:

• Decoupled code is easier to change.
• APIs and boundaries make code easier to ingest.
• Small chunks are easier to write than large ones.
• Layers of abstractions help tame complexity.

(Why intuitions? Some pundits have the hubris to say that they’ve developed rules or laws of coding. Ask them when they last wrote a decent-sized chunk o’ code.)

So it seems obvious to ask if any of our intuitions about writing good code would let us simplify ...