Software Design X-Rays

Track Change Patterns in Distributed Systems

If low cohesion is problematic, strong coupling is the cardinal sin that grinds microservice development to a halt. I experienced this the first time back in my days as a consultant working on a trading application. On my first day I got assigned what looked like a simple task, so I eagerly jumped into Emacs and started to write some code. Pretty soon I noticed that I lacked some data that were available in an adjacent subsystem, so I walked over to its team lead and asked for an extension to the API. “Sure,” she said, “that’s a simple tweak that we could do right away.” So I went back to my desk and waited. And waited. It turned out that the “simple tweak” took a week, and over the next months I ...