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5.7 Heuristics That Trade Off Design Complexity and Flexibility

Heuristic 5.6

All abstract classes must be base classes.

If a class cannot build objects of itself, then that class must be inherited by some derived class that does know how to build objects. If this is not the case, then the functionality of the base class can never be accessed by any object in the system, and therefore the class is irrelevant in the given domain. (There is one degenerate case where an abstract class that is not a base class can exist. We will examine this degenerate case in Chapter 8.)

What about the opposite heuristic梔o all base classes have to be abstract? After examining the new and full employee example above, the answer is obviously no. Both the new and full employee classes are concrete classes (i.e. they know how to build objects of themselves) and the new employee is a base class. However, there is a heuristic that captures this desirable design trait.

Heuristic 5.7

All base classes should be abstract classes.

This heuristic implies that all the roots of an inheritance tree should be abstract, while only the leaves should be concrete. Why is this a heuristic? Consider our inheritance model for the new and full employees. Our company has been so successful that it takes new employees five months to learn who to see for maintenance, purchase-order signatures, sick time issues, health insurance, etc. The company decides that it is necessary for new employees to have a one-day orientation session to reduce this learning curve. Obviously, full employees already know all of these details, so they do not need an orientation session. In our current design, can we add an orientation to the new employee class without adding it to the full employee class? The answer is no; we cannot add anything to the new employee class without also adding it to the full employee class. This is the danger of inheriting from a concrete class. The fear is that the specialization link between the two classes will not hold up under extension or refinement of the design. How could we have avoided this problem? Instead of claiming that full employees are special types of new employees, we could have claimed that new employees and full employees have something in common. This common information could have been captured in an abstract base class called All Employees, with the new and full employee classes becoming derived classes of this new abstract class (see Figure 5.12).

Figure 5.12. A better Employee inheritance hierarchy.

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In order to understand the strength of a heuristic, it is necessary to understand the ramifications of violating it. In this case, the necessary changes to our system were brought about by violating the heuristic. We had to rename all occurrences of NewEmployee to AllEmployee梐 global name change. This is the worst that can happen to a designer who violates this heuristic. In fact, if the designer can live with the name of the concrete class as the name of the new abstract class (renaming the concrete class to something different), then he or she may be able to avoid the name change in some languages. For example, name the abstract class NewEmployee and rename what used to be NewEmployee as NewNewEmployee. Typically, and this example is no exception, the name of the concrete base class is too specific to use as the name of the new abstract class.

Given that violations of this heuristic can force a designer to rename classes globally, shouldn't we always turn inheritance from a concrete class into inheritance from an abstract class (using the Employee classes as a model)? The answer would appear to be yes, except that another heuristic gets in our way. Consider the case where we cannot see any change to the base class that we would not want carried into the derived class. As Figure 5.13 shows, the NewEmployee class could still inherit from AllEmployees, but it would be empty梟o data and no behavior. All of its attributes would be derived from the abstract base class. This NewEmployee class is an irrelevant class since it adds no meaningful behavior to our system. Therefore, it should be removed, based on Heuristic 3.7.

Figure 5.13. NewEmployee as an irrelevant class.

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This is a case where one heuristic tells the designer to go in one direction and another heuristic tells the designer to go in the exact opposite direction. Which direction should we choose? If there is only one place in the design where the choice needs to be made, then it does not matter. One irrelevant class will not ruin a design, nor will one area of the design that may require a global name change. Unfortunately, most designs have many places where this decision needs to be made. I would not want 50 irrelevant classes in my system, nor would I want 50 potential name changes. The typical solution is to attempt to find which of the 50 cases are most likely to change. Add an irrelevant derived class for these. The others are left as inheritance from a concrete class. It is important to realize that finding the classes most likely to change is not an easy task. Imagine a designer in our employee domain standing up in a design critique and stating, "We would never give anything to a new employee that a full employee would not want as well." The assumption here is that everything a new employee gets is good. The designer has not considered orientation, layoff notices, probationary periods, etc. In languages that allow for type aliasing (e.g., the typedef statement in C and C++), a reasonable solution is to create the inheritance hierarchy with just the full and new employees (no abstract class) and alias the NewEmployee class to the AllEmployee class wherever applicable. This allows for easy global name changes should it ever become necessary.

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