Bulldozer00's Blog

Unless you’re a C++ programmer, you probably won’t understand the title of this post. It’s the definition of the “pitchInWhereNeeded” member function of a “Manager” class. If you look around your immediate vicinity with open eyes, that member function is most likely missing from your Manager class definition. If you’re a programmer, oops, I mean a software engineer, it’s probably also missing from your derived “SoftwareLead“, “SoftwareProjectManager“, and “SoftwareArchitect” classes too.

As the UML-annotated figure below shows, in the early twentieth century the “pitchInWhereNeeded” function was present and publicly accessible by other org objects. On revision number 1 of the “system”, as signaled by the change from “+” to “-“, its access type was changed to private. This seemingly minor change broke all existing “system” code and required all former users of the class to redesign and retest their code. D’oh!

On the second revision of the Manager class, this critical, system-trust-building member function mysteriously disappeared completely. WTF?. This rev 2 version of the code didn’t break the system, but the system’s responsiveness decreased since private self -calls by manager objects to the  “pitchInWhereNeeded” function were deleted and more work was pushed back into the “other” system objects. Bummer.