Re: Ingy's "Swiss Army Light Sabre" - or, "how do you design your APIs?"

in reply to Ingy's "Swiss Army Light Sabre" - or, "how do you design your APIs?"

One unobvious connection between XP practices and good APIs.

You quickly learn a lot about how much an API makes sense (or doesn't) when you try to use it. When you try to write a test suite for the API that you are developing, you are using it right there, and get immediate feedback on how that API is suboptimal. Before you have developed it, and when it is still cheap to change the API.

Comment on Re: Ingy's "Swiss Army Light Sabre" - or, "how do you design your APIs?"

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Re^2: Ingy's "Swiss Army Light Sabre" - or, "how do you design your APIs?" by adrianh (Chancellor) on Mar 28, 2004 at 12:20 UTC
One unobvious connection between XP practices and good APIs Another is the bottom-up-ness and simple design that comes out of You Ain't Going To Need It and Do The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work. You get an API that's generated from actual use-cases rather than one that was possibly over-designed to handle cases that are never needed - producing a smaller and simpler API.	[reply]

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