Implementation visibility – Part I

Somewhere in my take on programming, there lingers the concept of “implementation visibility”, that I’m not quite sure to be able to express clearly, but I’ll try.

Let’s say you are writing an academic text like a bachelor thesis and your professor makes it clear that she regards the list of literature a very important part of your work. What are you going to do? Concentrate on your cool topic and treat the literature as a secondary task? Or will you shift your focus and emphasize your extensive literature research, highlighting promising cross-references in your text? You’ll probably adjust your resources to make your list of literature more prominent, more visible. You respond to the priorities of your stakeholders.

Now imagine that your customer wants you to program a web application, but has one big requirement: All actions of the users need to be reassured with a confirmation question (as in “do you really want to delete this?”). He makes it clear that this is a mandatory feature that needs to be implemented with utmost care and precision. What would you do? We responded by adjusting our system’s architecture to incorporate the requirement into the API. You can read about our approach in this blog post from 2015. The gist of it is that every possible client of the system will be immediately aware of the requirement and has a much easier time conforming to it. It is harder to ignore or forget the requirement than to adhere to it because the architecture pushes you into the right direction.

The implementation of the customer’s requirement in the example above is very visible. You’ll take one look at the API and know about it. It isn’t hidden into well-meaning but out-dated developer documentation or implicitly stated because every existing action has a confirmation step and you should be sentient enough to know that this means your new one needs one, too. The implementation visibility of the customer’s requirement is maximized with our approach.

Stages of visibility

I have identified some typical stages (or levels) of implementation visibility that I want to present in this blog post series. That doesn’t mean that there won’t or can’t be others. I’m not even sure if the level system is as one-dimensional as I’m claiming here. I invite you to think about the concept, make your own observations and evolve from there. This is a starting point, not an absolute truth.

The following stages typically appear in my projects:

• level 0: Inline
  • level 0+: Inline with comment
  • level 0++: Inline with apologetic comment
• level 1: separate method
• level 2: separate class
  • level 2+: new type in domain model
• level 3: separate aggregate
• level 4: separate package or module
• level 5: separate application or service

In my day-to-day work, the levels 1 to 3 are the most relevant, but that’s probably not universally applicable. Our example above with the requirement-centered API isn’t even located on this list. I suggest it’s at level 6 and called separate concept or something similar.

An example to explain the visibility levels

Let’s assume a customer wants us to program a generic webshop. We are not very versed in commerce or e-commerce things and just start implementing requirements one after one.

After the first few iterations with demonstrated and usable artifacts, our customer calls us and explains that all prices in the webshop are netto prices and that there need to be some kind of brutto price calculation. You, being accustomed to prices that don’t change once you put products into your shopping cart, ask a few questions and can finally grasp the concept of value added taxes. Now you want to implement it into the webshop.

The first approach to the whole complex is to show the brutto prices right besides the netto prices when the user views his shopping cart. You can then validate the results with your customer and discuss problems or misconceptions that are now visible and therefore tangible.

The original code of your shopping cart renderer might look like this:

public class ShowShoppingCart {
  public ShoppingCartRenderModel render(Iterable<Product> inCart) {
    final ShoppingCartRenderModel result = new ShoppingCartRenderModel();
    for (Product each : inCart) {
      result.addProductLine(
               each.description(),
               each.nettoPrice());
      }
      return result;
  }
}

A quick explanation of the code: The class ShowShoppingCart takes some products and converts them into a ShoppingCartRenderModel that contains the shopping cart data in a presentable form so the GUI just needs to take the render model and paste it into some kind of template. For each product, there is one line with a description and the (already renamed) netto price on the page.

Visibility level 0: It’s just code anyway

Let’s start with the lowest and most straight-forward implementation visibility level: The inline implementation.

public class ShowShoppingCart {
  public ShoppingCartRenderModel render(Iterable<Product> inCart) {
    final ShoppingCartRenderModel result = new ShoppingCartRenderModel();
    for (Product each : inCart) {
      final Euro bruttoPrice = each.nettoPrice().multiplyWith(1.19D);
      result.addProductLine(
            each.description(),
            each.nettoPrice(),
            bruttoPrice);
    }
    return result;
  }
}

The new code is in lines 5 and 9. As you can see, the programmer chose to implement exactly what he understood from the discussion about netto and brutto prices with the customer. A brutto price is a netto price with value added tax. The VAT rate is 19 percent at the time of writing, so a multiplication with 1.19 is a valid implementation.

Our problem with this approach isn’t the usage of floating point numbers in the calculations or that calculations even exist in a method that should do nothing more than render some products, but that the visibility of the requirement is minimal. If you, I or somebody else doesn’t know exactly where this code hides, we will have a hard time finding it once the VAT is changed or anything else should be done with brutto prices or VATs.

Technically, the customer’s requirement is implemented and the brutto prices will show up. But because the concept of taxes (or VAT) is important for the customer, we likely made the code too invisible to be maintainable.

Visibility level 0+: Hey, I even wrote a comment

To make some part of the code stick out of the mess, we have the tool of inline code comments. Let’s apply them to our example and raise our visibility level from 0 to 0+:

public class ShowShoppingCart {
  public ShoppingCartRenderModel render(Iterable<Product> inCart) {
    final ShoppingCartRenderModel result = new ShoppingCartRenderModel();
    for (Product each : inCart) {
      // AN-17: calculating the brutto price from the netto price
      final Euro bruttoPrice = each.nettoPrice().multiplyWith(1.19D);
      result.addProductLine(
            each.description(),
            each.nettoPrice(),
            bruttoPrice);
    }
    return result;
  }
}

The new code is in lines 5, 6 and 10. You can see that the programmer chose the same approach as before, but realized that the code would be buried if not marked. Given that the requirement identifier is “AN-17”, the code can be found by a text search of this number. And if you happen to stumble upon this part of the application, you can deduct meaning about what you see from the comment.

Except that you cannot really be sure what the AN-17 code really is. Is the result.addProductLine() part of AN-17 or not? Would you expect the calculation of taxes and prices in a method called render() in a class named ShowShoppingCart? Is this implementation really correct? Aren’t there different tax rates for different products? Did the original author think about that? Is the customer content with this functionality?

Note that you cannot really test the brutto price calculation. You have to invent some products, render them and then scrape the brutto prices from the render model. That’s tedious at best and a clear sign that the implementation visibility is still too low. On to the next level

Visibility level 0++: This sucks, but I’ve got to go now

This level tries to make you a partner in crime by explicitly stating what’s obviously wrong with the code at hand. Now it’s your responsibility to fix it. You wouldn’t leave a broken window be, would you?

public class ShowShoppingCart {
  public ShoppingCartRenderModel render(Iterable<Product> inCart) {
  final ShoppingCartRenderModel result = new ShoppingCartRenderModel();
  for (Product each : inCart) {
    // AN-17: calculating the brutto price from the netto price
    // TODO: take different tax factors into account
    final Euro bruttoPrice = each.nettoPrice().multiplyWith(1.19D);
    result.addProductLine(
          each.description(),
          each.nettoPrice(),
          bruttoPrice);
  }
  return result;
  }
}

The new code is in lines 5, 6, 7 and 11. The new comment line 6 is typical for this visibility level: The original programmer knew that his implementation isn’t adequate but couldn’t be bothered with improving it. Perhaps he had external circumstances force him to do it. Whatever it was, this code is the equivalent to a soiled public toilet. The difference is, this time we can determine who made the mess.

The apologetic “I know I made a mess” comment often begins with TODO or FIXME. This isn’t directed towards the original author, it’s pointed at you, the person that happens to read the comment. Now, what are you going to do? Pretend you didn’t read the comment? Leave the toilet soiled? Clean up the mess of your predecessor? You probably have work to do, too. And doesn’t it work the way it is? Never change a running system!

We will see how you can improve the implementation visibility of the requirement in the next blog post of this series. Stay tuned!