03 October 2006

Girish Suryanarayana - Collected Quotes

"A software design can be described as a collection of design decisions. These design decisions include decisions about what classes should be included, how classes should behave, and how they should interact with each other. Each and every design decision is influenced by previously made design decisions, constraints on the design, and the requirements. In turn, every design decision also impacts the design; it can narrow down the set of future design decisions considerably or widen the scope of possible design decisions. In other words, each and every design decision impacts and even changes the context of the design." (Girish Suryanarayana et al, "Refactoring for Software Design Smells: Managing Technical Debt", 2015)

"An important enabling technique to effectively apply the principle of abstraction is to assign single and meaningful responsibility for each abstraction. In particular, the Single Responsibility Principle says that an abstraction should have a single well-defined responsibility and that responsibility should be entirely encapsulated within that abstraction. An abstraction that is suffering from Multifaced Abstraction has more than one responsibility assigned to it, and hence violates the principle of abstraction." (Girish Suryanarayana et al, "Refactoring for Software Design Smells: Managing Technical Debt", 2015)

"Given the significance of technical debt, it is important to be able to measure it. A prerequisite for measuring something is to be able to quantify it. In this context, technical debt is very difficult to quantify accurately. There are two main reasons for this. First, there is no clear consensus on the factors that contribute to technical debt. Second, there is no standard way to measure these factors." (Girish Suryanarayana et al, "Refactoring for Software Design Smells: Managing Technical Debt", 2015)

"How does a smell manifest in design? A smell occurs as a result of a combination of one or more design decisions. In other words, the design ecosystem itself is responsible for the creation of the smell. The presence of the smell in turn impacts the ecosystem in several ways. First, it is likely that the presence of the smell triggers new design decisions that are needed to address the smell! Second, the smell can potentially influence or constrain future design decisions as a result of which one or more new smells may manifest in the ecosystem. Third, smells also tend to have an effect on other smells. For instance, some smells amplify the effects of other smells, or co-occur with or act as precursors to other smells. Clearly, smells share a rich relationship with the ecosystem in which they occur." (Girish Suryanarayana et al, "Refactoring for Software Design Smells: Managing Technical Debt", 2015)

"Technical debt is the debt that accrues when you knowingly or unknowingly make wrong or non-optimal design decisions. [...] when a software developer opts for a quick fix rather than a proper well-designed solution, he introduces technical debt. It is okay if the developer pays back the debt on time. However, if the developer chooses not to pay or forgets about the debt created, the accrued interest on the technical debt piles up, just like financial debt, increasing the overall technical debt. The debt keeps increasing over time with each change to the software; thus, the later the developer pays off the debt, the more expensive it is to pay off. If the debt is not paid at all, then eventually the pile-up becomes so huge that it becomes immensely difficult to change the software. In extreme cases, the accumulated technical debt is so huge that it cannot be paid off anymore and the product has to be abandoned. Such a situation is called technical bankruptcy." (Girish Suryanarayana et al, "Refactoring for Software Design Smells: Managing Technical Debt", 2015)

"The primary intent behind the principle of encapsulation is to separate the interface and the implementation, which enables the two to change nearly independently. This separation of concerns allows the implementation details to be hidden from the clients who must depend only on the interface of the abstraction. If an abstraction exposes implementation details to the clients, it leads to undesirable coupling between the abstraction and its clients, which will impact the clients whenever the abstraction needs to change its implementation details. Providing more access than required can expose implementation details to the clients, thereby, violating the 'principle of hiding'." (Girish Suryanarayana et al, "Refactoring for Software Design Smells: Managing Technical Debt", 2015)

"The principle of abstraction advocates the simplification of entities through reduction and generalization: reduction is by elimination of unnecessary details and generalization is by identification and specification of common and important characteristics." (Girish Suryanarayana et al, "Refactoring for Software Design Smells: Managing Technical Debt", 2015)

"The principle of encapsulation advocates separation of concerns and information hiding through techniques such as hiding implementation details of abstractions and hiding variations." (Girish Suryanarayana et al, "Refactoring for Software Design Smells: Managing Technical Debt", 2015)

"The principle of hierarchy advocates the creation of a hierarchical organization of abstractions using techniques such as classification, generalization, substitutability, and ordering." (Girish Suryanarayana et al, "Refactoring for Software Design Smells: Managing Technical Debt", 2015)

"The principle of modularization advocates the creation of cohesive and loosely coupled abstractions through techniques such as localization and decomposition." (Girish Suryanarayana et al, "Refactoring for Software Design Smells: Managing Technical Debt", 2015)

"Why is the interest compounding in nature for technical debt? One major reason is that often new changes introduced in the software become interwoven with the debt-ridden design structure, further increasing the debt. Further, when the original debt remains unpaid, it encourages or even forces developers to use 'hacks' while making changes, which further compounds the debt." (Girish Suryanarayana et al, "Refactoring for Software Design Smells: Managing Technical Debt", 2015)

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