The Open Closed Principle

The Moral Center of Software Architecture. That's how Uncle Bob describes the Open-Closed Principle (OCP). In this episode you'll learn all about Bertrand Meyer's remarkable insight into Object Oriented Design and the motivation behind good Software Architecture. We'll discuss how it's possible for the source code of a system to be open for extension, but closed for modification. Then we'll show you how to construct designs that conform to that principle. Next we'll look at a truly awful design that violates the OCP and we'll show how that violation creates the design smells of Rigidity, Fragility, and Immobility. Then we'll present a truly elegant and beautiful design that conforms to the OCP. This design will startle you with it's essential simplicity; dazzle you with it's suave construction; enamor you with it's incredible flexibility. After seeing it, you'll begin to believe that software can be open for all extension and yet closed for all modification! Then we'll break your heart by showing you why the promise of the OCP is, in fact, a big lie. We'll tear that elegant design to shreds, and we'll show you why all that protection it claimed to offer was an illusion that depended upon prescience and perfect foresight. In the end we'll shatter your hopes and dreams in software design. Then we'll resurrect those hopes and dreams by describing a development process that helps to restore the truth behind the promise of the OCP. We'll show you that you can, in fact, make designs that conform to the OCP, if not in whole, then at least in part. We'll describe the disciplines that will help you to take the greatest advantage of the OCP. So sit yourself down and settle on in, because after we learn about the Quantum Discontinuity, we're going to open the can of worms called the Open Closed Principle.