Book Image

Agile Technical Practices Distilled

By : Pedro M. Santos, Marco Consolaro, Alessandro Di Gioia
Book Image

Agile Technical Practices Distilled

By: Pedro M. Santos, Marco Consolaro, Alessandro Di Gioia

Overview of this book

The number of popular technical practices has grown exponentially in the last few years. Learning the common fundamental software development practices can help you become a better programmer. This book uses the term Agile as a wide umbrella and covers Agile principles and practices, as well as most methodologies associated with it. You’ll begin by discovering how driver-navigator, chess clock, and other techniques used in the pair programming approach introduce discipline while writing code. You’ll then learn to safely change the design of your code using refactoring. While learning these techniques, you’ll also explore various best practices to write efficient tests. The concluding chapters of the book delve deep into the SOLID principles - the five design principles that you can use to make your software more understandable, flexible and maintainable. By the end of the book, you will have discovered new ideas for improving your software design skills, the relationship within your team, and the way your business works.
Table of Contents (31 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1
7
Section 2
13
Section 3
19
Section 4
25
Chapter 21
28
License: CyberDojo

Systems Entropy

Every single line of code we add to our system increases its overall entropy. If we allow it to grow without control, the maintainability and understandability of the system decreases very quickly. While we are developing a certain functionality, the concepts of cohesion, coupling, and connascence allow us to better understand the type and strength of the entropy we are adding. This is the reason that refactoring is such an important task. We use the feedback from our principles to refactor a system from high to low entropy.

The Relevance of Systems Entropy

In 1948, Claude Shannon published a paper, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, which is considered to be the beginning of an entirely new field of study called Information Theory. In this paper, he defines the concept of information entropy as a measure of the uncertainty in a message.

Note

Wikipedia, A Mathematical Theory of Communication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematical_Theory_of_Communication...