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It depends…

Ever struggled to articulate why one design choice feels better than another?
Most design debates in teams aren’t really about rules; they’re about misaligned forces. Coupling, Cohesion, and Change underpin many commonly cited best practices, and discussions about conflicting practices are often reflections of which kind of pain we’re trying to avoid.

As AI takes on more of the coding work, it becomes increasingly important to understand how complexity grows, trade-offs ripple, and systems succeed or fail. In this talk, we’ll introduce a practical framework for reasoning about these forces. You’ll learn how small structural choices amplify or contain change, why opposing rules can both be correct, and how to make deliberate trade-offs with clarity. With this shared language, “it depends” stops being a dead end and becomes the starting point for informed design decisions.

Devoxx

A conference talk presenting a mental framework for evaluating software design through the lens of coupling, cohesion, and change. The speaker, a staff engineer, introduces a formula where pain equals changes multiplied by structural properties (spaghettification). Cohesion is broken down into accidental, logical, model, and functional grouping types, with degradation mechanisms like scope inflation, level conflation, and misalignment. Coupling is analyzed by depth (intrusive, functional, model, contract) and breadth (distance, path topology, communication fan). The framework is then applied to explain SOLID principles, hexagonal architecture, and team topologies, showing how most best practices trade internal cohesion for increased path topology complexity.

Coupling, Cohesion and Change, The Blueprint of Modern Software Design by Boyen van Gorp