Reusability, testability, code complexity reduction and showing-off-ability programming importance

Question

There are lots of programming and architecture patterns. Patterns allow to make code cleaner, reusable, maintainable, more testable & at last (but not at least) to feel the follower a real cool developer.

How do you rank these considerations? What does appeal you most when you decide to apply pattern?

I wonder how many times code reusability (especially for MVP, MVC patterns) was important? For example DAL library often shared between projects (it's reusable) but how often controllers/views (abstracted via interfaces) are reused?

Answer 1

Code complexity reduction ranks high, if I keep things simple, I can maintain the project better and work on it faster to add/change features.

Reusability is a tool, one that has its uses, but not in every place. I usually refactor for reusability those components that show a clear history of identical use in more than three places. Otherwise, I risk running into the need of specialized behavior in a place or two, and end up splitting a component in a couple of more specialized ones that share a similar structure, but would be hard to understand if kept together.

Testability is not something I personally put a lot of energy in. However it derives in many cases from the reduced code complexity: if there are not a lot of dependencies and intricate code paths, there will be less dangers to break tests or make them more difficult to perform.

As for showing-off-ability... well... the customer is interested in how well the app performs in terms of what he wants from it, not in terms of how "cool" my code is. 'nuff said

Answer 2

I think you missed the single most important one from your list - more maintainable. Code that is well and consistently structured (as you get with easily reusable code) is much more easily maintained.

And as for reusablilty, then yes, on a number of occasions, usually something like : create a web page to save/update some record. Some months later - we need to expose this as a service for a third party to consume - if your code is structured well, this should be easy and low risk, as you're only adding a new front end.

Answer 3

I hope most people use patterns to learn how to solve design problems in certain context. All those non-functional requrements you mention can be really important depending on stakeholder needs for a project. As for MVC etc. it is not meant only to be reused between projects, that is often not possible or a good idea. The benefits you get from MVC should be important in the project you use that architecture. You can change independently details in view and models, you can reuse views with controllers for different models, you should be able to change persistence details without affecting your controllers and views. All this is imho very important during development of a single project.

Answer 4

"Code reusability" as defined in many books is more or less a myth. Try to focus more on easy to read - easy to maintain. Don't start with "reusability" in mind, will be better if you will start to think first on testability and then to reuse something. Is important to deliver, to test, to have clean code, to refactor, to not repeat yourself and less important to build from the start components that can be reused between projects. Whatever is to be reused must be a natural process, more like a discovery: you see a repetition so you build something that can be reused in that specific situation.