Single Responsibility +
- 1 minOne of the most commonly known principles in software design is the Single Responsibility Principle. It is usually used as a guideline for creating new software as well as analysing and improving existing one.
SRP however can be applied to other things as well. Git commits are an example. A good commit has a well defined purpose expressed through the message. A good message indicates very clearly what was done. If the message goes along the lines of “Add x and y” then perhaps the commit is adding too much and it’s better to split it into two.
A good commit is also atomic in its nature. One should be able to checkout/revert to a commit and run all the specs without any issues. It should stand on it’s own in this sense. If a commit fails the specs, it is very likely that it depends on another commit that contains the fix. If so, we have a temporal coupling between two (or more) commits which in this case can be eliminated by joining those commits into one.
This is just another area that I found this principle to be applicable and the more I think about the software development process, the more I realize it applies to many more.
Personal blog of Makis Otman