Principles of Component Cohesion: Granularity

The principles of component cohesion help developers decide how to partition classes into components. These principles depend on the fact that at least some of the classes and their interrelationships have been discovered. Thus, these principles take a bottom-up view of partitioning.

The Reuse/Release Equivalence Principle (REP)

The granule of reuse is the granule of release.

What do you expect from the author of a class library that you are planning to reuse? Certainly, you want good documentation, working code, well-specified interfaces, and so on. But there are other things you want, too.

First, to make it worth your while to reuse this person's code, you want the author to guarantee to maintain it for you. After all, if you have to maintain it, you are going to have to invest a tremendous amount of time into it, time that might be better spent designing a smaller and better component for yourself.

Second, you are going to want the author to notify you of any changes planned to the interface and functionality of the code. But notification is not enough. The author must give you the choice to refuse to use any new versions. After all, the author might introduce a new version just as you are entering a severe schedule crunch or might make changes to the code that are simply incompatible with your system.

In either case, should you decide to reject that version, the author must guarantee to support your use of the old version for a time. Perhaps that time is as short as 3 months or as long as a year; that is something for the two of you to negotiate. But the author can't simply cut you loose and refuse to support you. If the author won't agree to support your use of older versions, you may have to seriously consider whether you want to use that code and be subject to the author's capricious changes.

This issue is primarily political. It has to do with the clerical and support effort that must be provided if other people are going to reuse code. But those political and clerical issues have a profound effect on the packaging structure of software. In order to provide the guarantees that reusers need, authors organize their software into reusable components and then track those components with release numbers.

Thus, REP states that the granule of reuse, a component, can be no smaller than the granule of release. Anything that we reuse must also be released and tracked. It is not realistic for a developer to simply write a class and then claim that it is reusable. Reusability comes only after a tracking system is in place and offers the guarantees of notification, safety, and support that the potential reusers will need.

REP gives us our first hint at how to partition our design into components. Since reusability must be based on components, reusable components must contain reusable classes. So, at least some components should comprise reusable sets of classes.

It may seem disquieting that a political force would affect the partitioning of our software, but software is not a mathematically pure entity that can be structured according to mathematically pure rules. Software is a human product that supports human endeavors. Software is created by humans and is used by humans. And if software is going to be reused, it must be partitioned in a manner that humans find convenient for that purpose.

What does this tell us about the internal structure of a component? One must consider the internal contents from the point of view of potential reusers. If a component contains software that should be reused, it should not also contain software that is not designed for reuse. Either all the classes in a component are reusable, or none of them are.

Further, it's not simply reusability that is the criterion; we must also consider who the reuser is. Certainly, a container class library is reusable, and so is a financial framework. But we would not want them to be part of the same component, for many people who would like to reuse a container class library would have no interest in a financial framework. Thus, we want all the classes in a component to be reusable by the same audience. We do not want an audience to find that a component consists of some classes that are needed, and others that are wholly inappropriate.

The Common Reuse Principle (CRP)

The classes in a component are reused together. If you reuse one of the classes in a component, you reuse them all.

This principle helps us to decide which classes should be placed into a component. CRP states that classes that tend to be reused together belong in the same component.

Classes are seldom reused in isolation. Generally, reusable classes collaborate with other classes that are part of the reusable abstraction. CRP states that these classes belong together in the same component. In such a component, we would expect to see classes that have lots of dependencies on each other. A simple example might be a container class and its associated iterators. These classes are reused together because they are tightly coupled. Thus, they ought to be in the same component.

But CRP tells us more than simply what classes to put together into a component. It also tells us what classes not to put in the component. When one component uses another, a dependency is created between the components. It may be that the using component uses only one class within the used component. However, that doesn't weaken the dependency. The using component still depends on the used component. Every time the used component is released, the using component must be revalidated and rereleased. This is true even if the used component is being released because of changes to a class that the using component doesn't care about.

Moreover, it is common for components to live in DLLs. If the used component is released as a DLL, the using code depends on the entire DLL. Any modification to that DLL, even if that modification is to a class that the using code does not care about, will still cause a new version of the DLL to be released. The new DLL will still have to be redeployed, and the using code will still have to be revalidated.

Thus, I want to make sure that when I depend on a component, I depend on every class in that component. To say this another way, I want to make sure that the classes that I put into a component are inseparable, that it is impossible to depend on some and not the others. Otherwise, I will be revalidating and redeploying more than is necessary and will be wasting significant effort.

Therefore, CRP tells us more about what classes shouldn't be together than what classes should be together. CRP says that classes that are not tightly bound to each other with class relationships should not be in the same component.

The Common Closure Principle (CCP)

The classes in a component should be closed together against the same kinds of changes. A change that affects a component affects all the classes in that component and no other components.

This is the Single-Responsibility Principle (SRP) restated for components. Just as SRP says that a class should not contain multiple reasons to change, CCP says that a component should not have multiple reasons to change.

In most applications, maintainability is more important that reusability. If the code in an application must change, you would prefer the changes to occur all in one component rather than being distributed through many components. If changes are focused into a single component, we need redeploy only the one changed component. Other components that don't depend on the changed component do not need to be revalidated or redeployed.

CCP prompts us to gather together in one place all the classes that are likely to change for the same reasons. If two classes are so tightly bound, either physically or conceptually, that they always change together, they belong in the same component. This minimizes the workload related to releasing, revalidating, and redistributing the software.

This principle is closely associated with the Open/Closed Principle (OCP). For it is "closure" in the OCP sense of the word that this principle is dealing with. OCP states that classes should be closed for modification but open for extension. But as we learned, 100 percent closure is not attainable. Closure must be strategic. We design our systems such that they are closed to the most common kinds of changes that we have experienced.

CCP amplifies this by grouping together classes that are open to certain types of changes into the same components. Thus, when a change in requirements comes along, that change has a good chance of being restricted to a minimal number of components.

Summary of Component Cohesion

In the past, our view of cohesion was much simpler. We used to think that cohesion was simply the attribute of a module to perform one, and only one, function. However, the three principles of component cohesion describe a much more complex kind of cohesion. In choosing the classes to group together into a component, we must consider the opposing forces involved in reusability and developability.

Balancing these forces with the needs of the application is nontrivial. Moreover, the balance is almost always dynamic. That is, the partitioning that is appropriate today might not be appropriate next year. Thus, the composition of the component will likely jitter and evolve with time as the focus of the project changes from developability to reusability.