6 Principles Of Software Engineering That Every Engineer Should Know

Write better code with those 6 principles

Joseph Pyram
The Startup

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Photo by Alex Wong on Unsplash

Being a good software engineer is not just about coding, it’s about solving problems in the most effective and efficient manner. This can be achieved through algorithms, unit testing, and time-space complexity analysis. There are also a set of tried and true principles that have been developed over the years to refine the art and science of developing software applications. Those principles serve as a guide towards better and cleaner code that is easier to debug and understand.

Here’s our list of the most important principles of software engineering.

DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself)

This principle originates from the book “The Pragmatic Programmer” by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, who defined it as:

Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.

This means that every piece of data should have a single reference point or single source of truth (SSOT), such that changing a single part of that data doesn’t require changing logically unrelated elements. That’s because all occurrences of that data refer back to a single location. This is in contrast to code that requires…

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