Software Architect's Handbook

Information hiding

Information hiding is a principle that advocates for software modules to be designed such that they hide implementation details from the rest of the software system. The idea of information hiding was introduced by D.L. Parnas in On the Criteria to Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules, which was published in 1972.

Information hiding decouples the internal workings of a module from the places in the system that call it. The details of a module that do not need to be revealed should be made inaccessible. Information hiding defines constraints related to what properties and behaviors can be accessed. Callers interact with the module's public interface and are protected from the implementation details.

There are a ...