Whats entropy how to#
Whats entropy software#

If you explain that to Dave, your colleague developer, his answer will be the following: I wrote already a detailed article about this idea. More elements often bring more coupling, the bedrock of complexity. How do you create complexity? You just need to scale your project. It’s too complex to have a good mental model of it. Even if it was well-designed, the technologies used get old, the project is too big, it’s difficult to understand, ti’s time-consuming, and it’s boring.

After many months, nobody will want to work on the project anymore.

Since you’re all the best of the bests, everything will look fine for a while.

You and your team will add more and more stuff: features, code, packages, microservices.

You will sing while taking your shower “this greenfield project is the best tralala” every morning.

Take the best team (with you in it, of course!), the best environment, the best management, the best company culture, the best project. We can fight the amount of entropy in our software, but we can’t entirely remove it. We all need to understand, us, poor developers, this tragic truth.

Whats entropy software#

Basically, more a software system change, more its disorder, its entropy, increases. The idea of software entropy, first coined by the book Object-Oriented Software Engineering, was influenced by the scientific definition. It states that, for a closed, independent system, the amount of disorder doesn’t decrease overtime. Something you should be accustomed to, as a software developer.Įntropy also refers to the second law of thermodynamic in Physics. In Greek, it means transformation, change. It’s sometimes useful to look to the roots of the words we use, especially when they are pretty specific, like entropy. The possible causes of software entropy and solutions to keep it low.Įnough mumbling: let’s dive in! Know Your Enemy What Means Entropy And Why Is It In My Software?.

Whats entropy how to#

What is software entropy and how to spot it in your code.You need to fight it anyway, to keep your codebase, your colleagues, and yourself, healthy and sane.Īs you might not have guessed while reading this suspenseful introduction, this article is about software entropy. You can see software entropy as this Hydra: it’s an enemy which will make you sweat, but it won’t be possible to get totally rid of it. But you have a slight problem: the monster has many heads and, when you cut one of them, it grows back! This is a battle you can’t win. You grab your sword (of course you have a sword!), trying to defend the ones you love. You’re the only one on the road to stop this madness! A massive and hideous Hydra is rushing to you, willing to destroy your whole village. Suddenly, you hear a terrible and monstrous scream scattering the peace of the countryside. You are in the middle of the road leading to your village, where your friends, your family, and you favorite dog are living. , updated Twitter #Fundamentals #Complexity What is Software Entropy And How To Manage It?