Real-World Software Development

Chapter 3. Extending the Bank Statements Analyzer

The Challenge

Mark Erbergzuck was very happy with the work you did in the previous chapter. You built a basic Bank Statements Analyzer as a minimum viable product. Because of this success Mark Erbergzuck thinks that your product can be taken further and asks you to build a new version that support multiple features.

The Goal

In the previous chapter, you learned how to create an application to analyze bank statements in a CSV format. Along this journey you learned about core design principles that help you write maintainable code, the Single Responsibility Principle, and anti-patterns you should avoid, such as God Class and code duplication. While you were incrementally refactoring your code you also learned about coupling (how dependent you are on other classes) and cohesion (how related things are in a class).

Nonetheless, the application is currently pretty limited. How about providing functionality for searching for different kinds of transactions, supporting multiple formats, processors, and exporting the results into a nice report with different formats such as text and HTML?

In this chapter, you will go deeper in your software development quest. First, you will learn about the Open/Closed principle, which is essential for adding flexibility to your codebase and improving code maintenance. You will also learn general guidelines for when it makes sense to introduce interfaces, as well as other gotchas to avoid high coupling. ...