The Single responsibility principle

The Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) states that a software component must have only one responsibility. The fact that the class has a sole responsibility means that it is in charge of doing just one concrete thing, and as a consequence of that, we can conclude that it must have only one reason to change.

A class should have only one reason to change.

One way to determine if your class is in breach of the Single Responsibility Principle if you find methods that are mutually exclusive and do not relate to each other, they are the different responsibilities that have to be broken down into smaller classes.

The key point to keep in mind, is that small succinct classes are optimal.

Problem Domain

The primary objective behind the Single Responsibility Principle is to try to avoid creating objects and classes that have too many responsibilities, grouping different behaviours and unrelated functionality thus making classes harder to maintain and change.

Benefits

1. Reduces Code Complexity

The code in a class is focused satisfying a particular functionality, which reduces the complexity.

2. Improved readability, maintainability and extensibility

Each class and method have single functionality and therefore easy to read and understand.

3. Improved Testability

Easier and more efficient to write Unit tests

4. Reusability

By ensuring classes and methods focus on achieving one thing it is easier to re-use the methods.

5. Reduced coupling

classes are less dependent on each other.