Chapter 13. Sane Software Design

I have come up with an analogy that should make the basic principles of software design understandable to everybody. The great thing about this analogy is that it covers basically everything there is to know about software design.

Imagine that you are building a structure out of lead bars. The final structure will look like this:

You have to build the structure and put it up at a certain location, so that people can use it for something.

The lead bars represent the individual pieces of your software. Putting it up at the location is like putting your software into production (or sending it out to your users). Everything else should be fairly clear as to how it translates to software, if you think about it. You don't have to translate everything to software in your mind as you read, though. Everything should be quite clear if you just imagine that you really are just building a structure out of lead bars.

The Wrong Way

Imagine that you were building...