The God Class

This anti-pattern is also known as "The Blob" or "All in One" class/structure. The idea is to stuff everything into a single class, making it a single massive structure. It's called "God" class because itself as one entity can do everything.

Consequences

• Very difficult to testing once it grows towards an irreparable mass.
• Very hard to maintain the source code.

Symptoms

• When a class has multi-purpose definitions.
• When a class has more than 60 attributes.
• When a class has multiple purpose un-related / categorization capable functions
• Absent of object oriented / data structure design.
• Absent of an architecture.

Causes

• Lack of architecture design from the architect and developers.
• Lack experience in abstracting skills from the development team.
• Lack of architecture enforcement.
• Limited intervention.
• Specified disaster.
• Limited resources (time, expertise, skills).

Exception

• Wrapper to legacy system (e.g. binding).

Fixing Recipes

1. Schedule a refactor time.
2. Write test codes to lock the current results for the god class.
3. Start abstracting the class into architecture point of view. Ensure it is still producing the same test results.
4. Start abstracting the functions into libraries / multiple classes based on the architecture. Ensure it is still producing the same results.
5. Repeat until it reaches sensible, multiple maintainable classes.