Emergent Design: History, Concepts, and Principles

Software design is about change. A good design facilitates adding features—and adding new developers to the team. Yet any change to the code impacts design and could damage existing functionality. Without design idioms and practices, the code can degrade into a "big ball of spaghetti” and a maintenance nightmare. Your team must know which decisions to make early in design and which to defer. Rob Myers reviews “families” of design attributes and practices, showing the common principles within each. Exploring emergent design by tracing how the concept itself has evolved and matured over time, Rob covers traditional attributes of good object-oriented code (cohesion, encapsulation, polymorphism, coupling); design patterns and the wisdom discovered within; S.O.L.I.D. principles—all culminating in emergent design, where simple (not easy) practices meet the simplest of guidelines, such as Kent Beck’s “Four Rules of Simple Design.” And the result is code that is easy to understand and delightful to work on.