Chapter 4. Software Design, in Two Sentences

It is possible to reduce the primary principles of software design into just two statements:

1. It is more important to reduce the Effort of Maintenance than it is to reduce the Effort of Implementation.
2. The Effort of Maintenance is proportional to the complexity of the system.

And that is pretty much it.

If all you knew about software design were those two principles, you could evolve every other general principle of software development.

-Max