The largest software development organizations in the world make heavy use of microservices (or service-oriented architectures) - one kind of modularity that allows organizations with thousands of developers to be productive.
Our options today create a great hurdle for modularization refactoring work
Beyond classes and objects, the most common mechanisms to achieve modularity are libraries (running within the application process and services (running outside of the application process as standalone applications). These kinds of modularity create “perfect isolation.” Perfect in the sense that the functionality of these libraries and services verifiable in isolation.
From the perspective of refactoring towards libraries or services, the perfect isolation property poses a problem: The extraction refactoring needs to create “perfect” isolation, too. That is a daunting proposition for apps that have developed into “balls of mud” (lets say because of an over-eager object-relational-mapper layer - read: basically every Rails app in the world) - things are simply too entangled for this process to be easy.
Gradual Modularity removes the modularization refactoring hurdle
Gradual Modularity removes the need for perfect isolation. Take two parts (let’s call them packages) of an application that we’d like to modularize:
Only partially known dependencies? Only partially defined public APIs? Some usage of private code? Partially clobbered namespaces? Only partially separate databases? All of this doesn't work with services or libraries. It is totally fine with gradual modularity.
For each package we can define and lock in the level of isolation that we’d like to achieve for the moment. Depending on the level, violations are allowed. Violations don’t break the app, instead they are recorded in todo-lists that are checked in with the code.
Gradual Modularity, through allowing partial, leveled isolation and todo-lists for outstanding isolation work, gives developers a toolset to confidently and iteratively refactor towards a perfectly modularized system.
Follow along with me as I am writing a book on Gradual Modularity at https://leanpub.com/package-based-rails-applications
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by Stephan Hagemann