Revision as of 11:34, 24 November 2010

This anti-pattern occurs when there is insufficient encapsulation in a system and objects just access each other's internals directly rather than going through a public interface.

Liabilities

• Harder to find bugs because any part of the system could have potentially changed the state of an object to cause a bug so it is harder to determine where the problem occurred.
• Harder to reason about the behavior of an object because any part of the system can manipulate its internals.
• If many parts of the system access the internals of an object, the result is difficult to maintain Spaghetti code.
• It is harder to change the internal workings of a class because the change can effect many other parts of the system.
• Large public interfaces can make code hard to understand and obscure the original design.

Related design heuristics

• Information hiding
• Hide data within its class
• Minimal public interface
• Coupling and cohesion
• Don't expose mutable attributes
• Encapsulate that which varies
• Minimize accesses to variables