Responsibility-Driven Design (In Practice)

1    INTRODUCTION

“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today”
-Abraham Lincoln

Have you taken responsibility in your work lately? I find it frustrating that some people may not take responsibility in their software design and just writing software until it “works”. We all need to take responsibility in our daily work; software design/development work is no exception.

What drives software design? Several mechanisms are introduced over the years that explains what different approaches you can use or combine. Test-Driven Development talks about writing tests first before writing production code, Data-Driven Development talks about defining processing strategies in function of your data, Domain-Driven Design talks about solving a domain problem by using the vocabulary of the Ubiquitous Language with a high-level abstraction, Behavior-Driven Design is in short extension of Test-Driven Development with concepts of Domain-Driven Design…

Following article talks about just another technique: Responsible-Driven Design, and how I use it in my daily development work.

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock (founder of RDD) talks about some constructs and stereotypes that defines this approach and helps you build a system that takes responsibility at first place. I’m not going to give you a full description about her technique, though I’m going to give you a very quick view of how this can be used to think about your daily designing moments; at high-level and low-level software design.

A lot of programmers don’t think that they should be involved in designing the software, “That’s work for the Application Architect”. Their so wrong. This article is for developers, but also project managers and architects.

“Software Development is all design”
—Eric Evans

Your goal should not be to find THE solution at the beginning of your design process; it should be your goal to have a flexible design that you can refactor constantly to have THE solution at the end of your design process.

“Good programmers know they rarely write good code the first time”
—Martin Fowler

“The problem with software projects isn’t change, per se, because change is going to happen; the problem, rather, is the inability to cope with change when it comes.”
—Kent Beck

2    DEFINING RESPONSIBILITIES

“Understanding responsibilities is key to good object-oriented design”
—Martin Fowler

Defining responsibilities is crucial to have a good software design. Use Cases are a good starting point for defining responsibilities. These cases state some information of “What if… Then… and How” chains. Though, it isn’t the task of use cases to define coordination or control of the software or the design; these tasks you must define yourself.
 
Rebecca describes some Roles to describe different types of responsible implementations to help you define software elements. A “Role” is some collection of related tasks that can be bundled to a single responsibility.

• Service providers: designed to do things
• Interfaces: translate requests and convert from one level of abstraction to another
• Information holders: designed to know things
• Controllers: designed to direct activities
• Coordinators: designed to delegate work
• Structurers: manage object relations or organize large numbers of similar objects

Some basic principles of responsibilities are the following: doing, knowing and deciding. Some element does something, another knows something and another decides what’s next or what must be done.
This can help in the defining process of responsibilities. Mixing more than one of these principles in a single element is not a good sign of your design.

When structuring the requirements, and use cases, try to find the work that must be done, the information that must be known, the coordination/control activities, possible solutions to structure these elements…

It’s a good practice to define these responsibilities in the Software Design Document for each significant element. Rebecca talks about CRC Cards which list all the possible information one element knows, what work it must do…

3    ASSIGNING RESPONSIBILITIES 

Data-Driven Design talks about a centralized controlled system in its approach to have application logic in one place; this get quick complex though. Responsible-Driven Design is all about delegated control to assign responsibilities to elements and therefore each element can be reused very quickly because it only fulfills its own responsibilities and not ones from some other elements in the design. Distributing to much responsibilities can lead to weaker objects and collaboration/communication of objects.

When assigning responsibilities, there’s a lot of Principles/Patterns that helps me to reflect constantly on my design. Here are some I think about daily:

Keep information in one place:     
“Single Point of Truth Principle”: principle that states that each piece of information is stored exactly once.

Keep a responsibility small:     
“Law of Demeter – Principle of the least knowledge”: each element should have a limited piece of knowledge stored itself and have about other elements (see also Information Hiding and Information Expert).

Wrap related operations:     
“Whole Value Object” (for example): wrap related operations/information in an object on its own and give it a descriptive name.

Only use what you need:    
“Interface Segregation Principle”: each interface should only implement method which it needs.

Aligned responsibility:    
“Single Responsible Principle (a class should only have one reason to change)”: each part of your software should have a single responsibility and this responsibility should entirely be wrapped in this part.
 
And so, so many more…

4    CLASS RESPONSIBILITIES

When defining classes, the Single Responsibility Principle comes in mind. Each class should do only one predefined task/responsibility. A trick I use to keep me always aware of this responsibility, is to write above each class in comments what that class should do and only do.
 
If you find yourself writing words like: “and”, “or”, “but”, “except”… you’re probably trying to do more than just one thing. It’s also very useful when adding new code to check if it’s still in the class its responsibility; if not, rethink your design to find the exact spot to where to put your new code. Also, try to speak in one sentence about responsibility.
 
Classes which names contains: “manager”, “info”, “process”… is also an indication that you’re doing something more than it should in your class. It could also mean that you named the class with such a general name because otherwise it will not state the class its responsibility.

In that way, you have a “nice” Anti-Pattern in place which I like to call: Responsibility-Hiding Anti-Pattern. Hiding of responsibilities should (of course) be eliminated, it only obscures the design and is a weak excuse for a bad design. A class named “ElementProcessor” for example is a perfect example; “What’s happening in the Process-part?”. It feels the class has some black magic in it and you can call the class to say: “Do the magic!”. Use strong descriptions when defining responsibilities for your class, if you can’t do that, refactor your class until you can.

One of the best reasons to create classes is Information Hiding. If a subset of methods in a class uses a subset of information. Then that part could/must be refactored into a new class. This way we have not only Hide the information, we have refactored the data and logic so it’s on the same Rate of Change.

Can you spot following misplaced responsibility?
 

Is it the job of the File Attachment Uploader class to know what extension the Attachment should need? What if I need a FTP Attachment Uploader?

For people who wants more read: assigning to many responsibilities is actually related to the Anti-Patterns from Brown: Software Development Anti-Pattern: Blob/God-Class Anti-Pattern which talks about a single class that contains a bunch information, has some logic exposed… a class that contains SO MANY RESPONSIBILITIES; and the Software Architecture Anti-Pattern: Swiss Army Knife Anti-Pattern which talks about a complex interface (so multiple implementations) that has multiple RESPONSIBILITIES and is used in to many software problems (as a Swiss Army Knife) as solution.

5    FUNCTION RESPONSIBILITIES

I told you that I get very deep, now I’m going to talk about just a function. What of responsibility has a function for example. The name of a function should always be a verb for a start. Something to do.

Naming is key in good communication; which follows also another Principle: Principle of Least Surprise. Only to look at some name you should have a clue what’s been done in that function/class/package… so you don’t get surprised.

A function should (definitely) only do one thing. Robert C. Martin talks about different ways to spot if a function does more than one thing: if you can extract a part of the function and give a meaningful name that doesn’t restate the original function name; you’re doing more than one thing; and so, have multiple responsibilities.

 Looking back at the previous example (after refactoring of the “GetExtension” method). Does “Upload Attachment” one thing? No, it gets first the exact path from attachment related information.

Of course, this example and still be refactored, and please do. Also, note that the extracted function called “GetAttachmentLocation” and not “GetLocation”. Because we added the “Attachment” part. The function logically gets an attachment as argument from the “UploadAttachment” function.

Try to always use descriptive names in your functions and say what you do in the function, not HOW you do it. Name your function after its responsibility. If we named the function “GetLocation” there would be not logically explanation why we would send an Attachment with it because it isn’t in the function its responsibility.

 
After again a refactoring session, we could see that there’s maybe a missing concept. Why doesn’t have the Attachment a location as information? Also, I don’t like to see if a function has one or multiple parameters AND a return value. It violates the Query-Command Separation Principle.

Note that we also extracted the function with the File Stream related information. We did this so each function is on the same level of abstraction. Each function should do as the name says it does, no surprises. And every time you go to the next implementation, you should get deeper, more concrete and less abstract. This way each function exists on one and only one layer of abstraction. “UploadAttachment” is on a higher layer of abstraction that “AssignAttachmentLocation” and “SaveAttachmentToFileSystem”.

It’s the responsibility of the “UploadAttachment” function to delegate to the two functions and not to try do something concrete itself.

Now, we could still refactor this because there isn’t any exception handling functionality for example. Just like refactoring is an iterative process, so is software designing. Please constantly refactor your code to a better approach.

I rename my classes/functions/… daily for example. I then look at it from a distance and think: “does this really explains what I want to say?”, “Is there any better approach?”, “Is it the responsibility of this variable to know this?”, “Does this function only its responsibility?” …

6    DOCUMENTATION RESPONSIBILITIES

One of the reasons documentation exist, is to define responsibilities. Many developers don’t see the purpose of defining a software design documentation, because it’s extra work and gets out of date fast. But also, because it explains something they already know (or think they know). In this document, you describe what each element/package’s responsibility is, why you named something like that…
 
Most of the time, I define for each layer in my design (see Layered Architecture) a separated block of documentation. Each title starts with the same explanation: Purpose. What’s the reason this package exists? After that a Description section is placed to describe some common information and responsibility the layer has. Next, is the UML Schema/Interaction Diagram section where schemas are placed to have some technical description how object are connected (UML) and collaborate (Interaction) with each other.

Eric Evans state that we should name our layers not only by their technical term like: Infrastructure Layer, Domain Layer, Application Layer, Presentation Layer… but also by their Domain Name. What Role plays this layer in your software design?

So, to summarize:

• Title
• Purpose
• Description
• UML Schema
• Interaction Diagram

Just like writing Tests make you think about dependencies and help you to rework your design to a better approach; helps writing high-level software documentation me to get the purpose of each layer in the design. While typing purposes/descriptions/responsibilities… in my documentation, I somethings stops and thinks: “Didn’t I just wrote a piece of code that doesn’t fall in this layer responsibility?”.

Interaction Diagrams are less popular than UML but describes the actual flow your design is following. You quick find a spot in your diagrams where there are just too many arrows. This also helps you think about coordination and control of your design. Please do not underestimate this kind of approach, it helped me to get the design in its whole form.

If your team plans a weekly code freeze, this could be an ideally time to update the documentation and schema’s. This not only keeps track of your changes and responsibilities, it also helps to introduce the design to new members of the team.

This kind of approach helps me to move elements through layers to find a right home.

7    CONCLUSION

When writing every word of code, think about what you’re doing. It is the right place to put this here? Is it my job to know that kind of information? Do I have the responsibility to do this? Why does this element have to make that decision? …

Every word, every line, every class, every package… has a responsibility and a purpose to exist. If you can’t say way in a strong description why this class knows something, why a function has an argument, why a package is named that way… that you should probably put on your refactoring-head.
 
@Codit we aren’t satisfied just because our code works. The first obvious step in programming is that your code works; only then the real work begins…

Think about what you’re doing and take responsibility.