Heuristics are powerful tools in designing software and they provide a more subjective view of software quality.  Heuristics may occur as individual pieces of developers’ or as a suite covering multiple aspects of software development. Software development is a complex process. It is very difficult to define or measure software qualities and quantities and to determine a valid measurement metric. Heuristics plays an important role in software development and are widely used to provide a link between design principles and software measurement. They offer insightful information based upon experience that is known to work in practice. Heuristics are not meant to be exact; in fact, they derive their benefits from this imprecision by providing an informal guide to good and bad practices. 

Design Heuristics Examples

Software  designers  aim  to  satisfy  the  expectations  of stakeholders  by  meeting  functional  and  non-functional requirements.  These are some of the heuristics that software designers find useful, they help  to write better code: 

• All data should be hidden within its class. 
• Users  of  a  class  must  be  dependent  on  its public  interface,  but  a  class  should  not  be dependent on its users
• Minimize  the  number  of  messages  in  the protocol of a class
• Implement  a  minimal  public  interface that  all classes understand
• Do  not  put  implementation  details  such  as common-code private functions into the public interface of a class
• Do  not  clutter  the  public  interface  of  a  class with things  that users of that class are not able to use or are not interested in using
• A class should only use operations in the public interface of another class or  has  nothing  to  do with that class
• A  class  should capture  one and  only one  key abstraction
• Keep related data and behavior in one place
• Spin  off non  related  information  into  another class
• Be  sure  the  abstractions  that  you  model  are classes and not simply the roles objects play

Heuristics provide a link between sets of abstract design principles and quantitative software metrics. They are an important part of software  design  and  are  becoming  more  widely  used. Effective  visualization  of  heuristics  includes  quantitative, qualitative  and  ambient aspects.   

I hope this short introduction to design heuristics was useful for you, to know more about it, contact us for a personalized course.