Designing Software Systems That Age Well and Adapt to Change

Building systems that are as easy to understand and maintain in year five as they were in year one does not happen naturally. It takes deliberate and disciplined effort, along with a firm grasp of the reasons, to understand why systems become difficult to change. This resistance to change is known as software entropy, which is the natural tendency of software to devolve toward disorder and chaos. In this chapter, we will focus on what it takes to design, build, and maintain systems that age well and can adapt to change over the lifetime of the project.