Reviewing what challenges design patterns solve
Take a deep breath and think about the motivation for writing the program. The program is written in a programming language, in our case, Java, and is a human-readable form to address a specific challenge. Let’s look at it from a different perspective.
We can state that writing a program is considered a goal. The goal has its reason defined by known needs or requirements in most cases. Expectations and limitations are defined. When the goal is known, each action is chosen with the aim of achieving it. The goal is evaluated, organized, and placed in the context of the destination, where the destination means a work program addressing the required challenge. Imagine all the difficulties mentioned in the previous sections.
Day after day, a new solution is posed, instead of a transparent solution. Every day, another local success keeps the project afloat, despite everything looking good on the surface.
Currently, most teams follow the SCRUM framework. Imagine a situation where the team follows the SCRUM framework (see Reference 4) and application development begins to deviate from the goal. Daily standup meetings run smoothly from time to time: it is mentioned that a fundamental error has been found. A few days later, the bug is successfully fixed with great applause. Interestingly, the frequency of such notifications is growing – more corrections, more applause. But does this really mean that the project is moving towards its goal? Does this mean that the application works? Let’s look at the answer.
There is a darker side – the backlog is growing with features and technical debt. Technical debt is not necessarily a terrible thing. Technical debt can stimulate the project and can be especially useful in the concept validation phase. The problem with technical debt occurs when it is not recognized, ignored, and poorly evaluated – even worse when technical debt starts being labeled as new features.
Although the product backlog should be one entity, it begins to consist of two different and unfortunately incompatible parts – the business and the sprint backlog (mostly technical debt). Of course, the team is working on a sprint backlog that comes from planning meetings, but with increasing technical debt, there is less and less room for the relevant business functions of the product. The trends observed in this way can result in extremely tricky situations during each new sprint planning session, where the development resources should be allocated. Let’s stop for a moment and recall this situation where the team cannot move the product forward due to technical debt.
The values of the SCRUM methodology can be simplified to courage, concentration, determination, respect, and openness. These values are not specific to the SCRUM framework. Because the team’s motivation is to deliver the product, they all sound very logical and fair.
We will now refresh our memory of the state the team has achieved. A state where it cannot move the project forward and struggles with the definition and proper consolidation of technical departments. This means that the team is doing its job, but may deviate from achieving its ultimate goal. Every discussion is extremely difficult because it is difficult to solve and describe the problem correctly for many different reasons. It may seem that developers may lose their language of communication and begin to misunderstand each other. We can see that the entropy of the software has increased because the coherence is not maintained. The project is beginning to rot and convergence to the inevitable wasted development time increases.
Let us take another deep breath and think together about how to prevent such a situation. It must be possible to identify these tendencies. Usually, each team has some commonality: the team is not always homogeneous in terms of knowledge, but this should not prevent us from identifying the degradation of the learning curve.
The project learning curve can help us identify a rotting project. Instead of gradual improvements towards the goal, the team experiences local successes full of technical repairs and solutions. Such successes do not even correspond to the values of SCRUM and gradual improvement seems unlikely. The solution may not be considered an improvement because it is specific to a particular movement and may violate the specifications of the technology used. During the solution period, the team may not acquire any useful knowledge applicable to the future. This can soon be considered a missing business opportunity due to the inability to supply business elements or only parts of them.
In addition to the degradation of the learning curve, other symptoms can be identified. This can be described as an inability to test a business function. Project code is proving sticky, dependencies are out of control, which can also harm code readability, testability, and, of course, programmer discipline. The daily goal of the software designer can be reduced to closing a ticket.
To avoid getting to this state, this book will provide some guidelines for solving the most common problems in the following chapters by introducing and questioning different types of design patterns. The design patterns are in line with the aforementioned basic pillars of OOP and APIE and promote the principles of SOLID.
What’s more, design patterns can highlight any misunderstood directions and enforce the don’t repeat yourself (DRY) principle. As a result, there is much less duplication, code testability, and more fun on the project.
That brings us to the end of this chapter.
