Good Software Design is as Little Design as Possible

Ten Principles of Good Design Redux | Part 10

I think it was the eminent Rico Mariani who coined the term ”OOPoholic” to describe a software engineer who is addicted to adding gratuitous indirection and complexity to their code in the name of Object Oriented Design. After doing many code and architecture reviews I now develop a speech impediment every time I hear the word “facade”.

Einstein is credited with saying "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." I think this holds especially true for software. Design patterns were originally proposed to make designing and describing designs easier, not harder. I propose the following razor:

If using a particular design pattern makes it harder to describe the the overall design to ones grandmother then one probably shouldn’t be using it.

Note: Replacing “grandmother” with “Project Manager” or “Client” in the aforementioned, does not reduce its utility in any way.