Whenever you join an existing team and start work on their codebase you need to orientate yourself so that you have a feel for the system’s architecture and design. If you’re lucky there is some documentation, perhaps nice diagrams to give you an overview. Hopefully you also have an extensive suite of tests to tell you how the system behaves.
More than likely there is nothing or very little to go on, and if it’s a truly legacy system any documentation could well be way out of date. At this point you pretty much only have the source code to work from. Whilst this is the source of truth, the amount of code you need to read to become au fait with all the various high-level concepts depends in part on how well it’s laid out.
Static Structure
Irrespective of whether you like to think of your layers in terms of onions or brick walls, all code essentially gets organised on disk and that means the solution structure is hierarchical in nature. In the most popular languages that support namespaces, these are also hierarchical and are commonly laid out on disk to reflect the same hierarchy [1].
Although the compiler is happy to just hoover up source code from the entire solution and largely ignore the relative position of the callers and callees there are useful conventions, which if honoured, allow you to reason and refactor the code more easily due to lower coupling. For example, defining an interface in the same source file as a class that implements it suggests a different inheritance use than when the interface sits externally further up the hierarchy. Also, seeing code higher up the hierarchy referencing types deeper down in an unrelated branch is another smell, of an abstraction potentially depending on an implementation detail.
Navigating the Structure
One of the things I’ve noticed in recent years whilst pairing is that many developers appear to navigate the source code solely through their IDE, and within the IDE by using features like “go to definition (implementation)”. Some very rarely see the solution structure because they hide it to gain more screen real estate for the source file of current interest [2].
Hence the only time the solution structure is visible is when there is a need to add a new source file. My purely anecdotal evidence suggests that this will be added without a great deal of thought as the code can be easy located in future directly by the author through its class name or another reference; they never have to consider where it “logically” resides.
Sprawling Suburbs
The net result is that namespaces and packages suffer from urban sprawl as they slowly accrete more and more code. This newer code adds more dependencies and so the package as a whole acquires an ever increasing number of dependencies. Left unchecked this can lead to horrible cyclic dependencies that are a nightmare to resolve.
I recently had the opportunity to revisit the codebase for a greenfield system I had started a few years before. We initially partitioned the code into a few key assemblies to get ourselves going and so I was somewhat surprised to still see the same assemblies a few years later, albeit massively overgrown with extra responsibilities. As a consequence even their simple home-grown tools had bizarre dependencies dragged in through bloated shared libraries [3].
Take a Stroll
So in future, instead of taking the Underground (subway) through your codebase every day, stop, and take a stroll every now-and-then around the paths. The same rules about cohesion within the methods of a class also apply at the higher levels of design – classes in a namespace, namespaces in an assembly, assemblies in a solution, etc. Then you’ll find that as the system grows it’s easier to refactor at the package level [3].
(For more on this topic see my older post “Who’s Maintaining the 100 Foot View?”.)
[1] Annoyingly this is not a common practice in the C++ codebases I’ve worked on.
[2] If I was being flippant I might suggest that if you really need the space the code may be too complicated, as I once did on Twitter here.
[3] I once dragged in a project’s shared library for a few useful extension methods to use in a simple console app and found I had pulled in an IoC container and almost a dozen other NuGet dependencies!
[4] In C# the internal access modifier has zero effect if you stick all your code into one assembly.
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