Continuous Delivery and Conway's Law

The challenges of continuous delivery

Continuous Delivery is more and more becoming a mainstream practice in how to create and deliver software. The reason for this are the numerous benefits this practice will have on the business as a whole. But as with most other things there is no free lunch and these benefits do not come without a price. An example of this is the fact that there are many challenges you may face when trying to implement continuous delivery in an existing organization. My colleague Daniel Deogun and I have spent quite a lot of time working with implementing continuous delivery practices within organizations. And in doing so we started to notice some reoccurring patterns among the challenges that organizations run into when moving towards continuous delivery.

Custom accessors with IntelliJ's new code generation features

The problem with getters

If you know your Java history, you will also be familiar with the naming conventions for accessors and mutators that was introduced, and defined, by the JavaBeans specification. (i.e. the good ol' getters and setters) This naming convention became more or less a de facto convention for accessor and mutator methods in Java. Even for objects that had no intentions whatsoever to be a java bean.
And because it was such a widespread naming convention many frameworks and libraries started to rely on that convention in order to provide useful features. Luckily, many of the popular frameworks and libraries that are used today no longer require these naming conventions in order to function.

That means that today it is perfectly fine to write code like person.name() if it makes more sense to you and you will not be forced to write person.getName() just in order to get your tooling to work.