An oxymoron is a construct that makes no sense because it joins together two terms that contradict one another. In this post we'll look at some you might come across in development projects. I'll grow this article over time. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to message me!
Oxymorons
- Refactoring Story - A story adds customer value, something tangible that the customer can appreciate. Refactoring is changing the implementation of a software system without the knowledge of the users or customers. So we can be either doing a story or refactoring.
- Refactoring Interfaces - An interface is part of the contract our software components and applications provide. Refactoring is changing the implementation without the knowledge of the users or customers. So if we change the contract, the users know about it. We can change interfaces or we can provide new interfaces but its not possible to refactor them.
- Object Oriented Database - these are a niche area of database theory that haven't really caught on in wider industry and they are also an oxymoron. Databases typically need to know a lot about our classes data structures in order to persist the data in a way that facilitates efficient storage and retrieval. Because of need to know the classes data structure, OODBMS break encapsulation, a key principle of object orientation. This places change restrictions and limitations on our software - something OO is supposed to help avoid
Definitions:
- Refactoring - Changing the implementation of a software system, without the knowledge of the users/components that depend on the software system.
- Story - Something that adds tangible customer value.
- Interface - The point of entry to a software system. Could be programatically ie like an Application Program Interface. It could be via the command line or via a Graphical system.
- Object Oriented - Objects are programming entities that exhibit the principles of abstraction, encapsulation, polymorphism and inheritance.
- Database - a software system that allows us to persist data to survive application restart, typically in tables, columns and rows. Columns are generally typed and can be indexed to facilitate faster querying.
