Dependency Management Techniques
Why is software so difficult to change? When you establish your initial vision for the software’s design and architecture, you imagine a system that is easy to modify, extend, and maintain. Unfortunately, as time passes, changes trickle in that exercise your design in unexpected ways. Unlike what you had anticipated, each change begins to resemble nothing more than another hack, until finally the system becomes a tangled web of code that few developers care to venture through. Eventually, modifications to the software intended to improve the system have the opposite affect of breaking other parts of the system. The software is beginning to rot.
The most common cause of rotting software is tightly coupled code with a heavy dependency graph. This session explores the most common symptoms of rotting design, examine their root cause, and present techniques and patterns that have been used on a number of real world projects to help manage dependencies across classes, packages, and the binary units of deployment.
About Kirk Knoernschild
Kirk is an industry analyst at Burton Group. For 15 years, he has worked in the trenches on real software projects. He takes a keen interest in design, architecture, application development platforms, agile development, and the IT industry in general, especially as it relates to software development.
In 2002, Kirk wrote the book Java Design: Objects, UML, and Process, published by Addison-Wesley. He has also written numerous whitepapers and articles, including The Agile Developer column for The Agile Journal. Kirk is the founder of Extensible Java, a growing resource of component design pattern heuristics for Java that can easily be applied to most other platforms, including .Net. Kirk has trained thousands of software professionals, teaching courses on UML, Java J2EE technology, object-oriented development, component based development, software architecture, and software process. He enjoys hacking in a variety of languages, including Java, .Net, Ruby, and PHP.
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