Practices for Writing Maintainable Object-Oriented Code

Rafael A. George Duval
2 min readMar 27, 2024

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Your knowledge will increase over time as you work on your application. This means that some of your decisions now need to be altered in the future if your application is successful.

Writing code that’s easy to change makes changes easier.

Moreover, usable code should work well in new and unexpected situations. Finally, the code should encourage these qualities to be maintained when modified. Metrics that measure how well an application follows OO design principles can be helpful. But, it’s essential to use the right metrics as incorrect metrics can lead to difficulties in the future.

Metrics that look good may only sometimes state a well-designed application that’s easy to change.

Building flexibility into the codebase with every change is essential to make changes more manageable. To simplify the design, it’s crucial to ensure that the code works and passes all tests before focusing on making it more expressive. One way to improve the visibility of extracted methods is to move them to another class. The goal is to keep the design as simple as possible.

Every class should be responsible for making object-oriented software maintainable and flexible.

When designing an application, focusing on flexibility over aesthetics is crucial. To gain insights into a problem, apply refactoring before adding new features to the codebase. Programmers should focus on flexibility rather than trying to achieve perfection or ideals.

Confident designers can embrace the ambiguity of an object’s class, and objects in a system can be composed depending on the context.

[¹]: A Philosophy of Software Design

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Rafael A. George Duval
Rafael A. George Duval

Written by Rafael A. George Duval

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