God Object
In object oriented programming God object or God class and sometime omniscient or all-knowing object is an anti-pattern that references a large number of distinct types, has too many unrelated or uncategorized methods, or some combination of both.
The God object is a part of the code smell group and it is a kind of object that knows too much or does too much
If your object has following features then you are dealing with god object:
- Too many functions in a class
- Knows too much about the application and can interact with all the data
- Difficult to maintain because changes typically introduce side effects
- Extremely complicated
Why God Object is Problem?
Against of SOLID principles
God class has multiple responsibilities or contains many classes which is against of single responsibility and its not easy to integrate with other part of program.because God class is responsible of too many of it has to be frequently updated, increasing the changes that breaking changes are introduced.
It’s hard to debug, extend, and maintain over time
It contains cluttered code that is difficult to maintain, extend, use, test, and integrate with other parts of the application it means it agains of coupling standard. Coupling is the connection between one piece of code and another. Keep it to a minimum. If a problem arises with one piece, you’ll need to adjust each piece that’s coupled to it. A developer can fall down the rabbit hole trying to find out which coupled function didn’t get updated.Avoid this problem by maintaining solid principles and guidelines for your team. That way, your code will remain decoupled and flexible to future change.
Your code is Fragile and is difficult to read and understand.
Refer back to Robert Martin’s quotation. Your team will be reading the codebase significantly more than writing code into it. So if the code is too complex and lacks readability, it’ll continue to slow down the production process.
How To Solve God Object
Think before pulling method:
- what data does this method operate?
- what is the responsibility of object?
- Try to implement Interface of class
- Does definition of the object is against SOLID principles?
Unit Test
- Verify the accuracy of a section of code
- Separate independent sections of a code
- Make code reusability more feasible
- Pattern testing: Pattern testing is a technique used in unit testing that tries to identify patterns that lead to errors in software.
Refractor your Object!
