Top 10 list

Use bare bones methodology

Your analysis and design methodology must account for, at minimum, the classes in your system, their public interfaces, and their relationships to other classes, especially base classes. But anything more than that may be overkill. Ask yourself if all the pieces produced by your methodology have value over the lifetime of the program. If they do not, maintaining them will cost you. Members of development teams tend not to maintain anything that does not directly contribute to their productivity; this is a fact of life for which many design methods don't account.

Previous: #5 - Name classes intelligently

Next: #7 - Automate everything

Elegance always pays off	Use bare bones methodology
First make it work, then make it fast	Automate everything
Remember the "divide and conquer" principle	Write test code early
Separate the class creator from the class user (client programmer)	Get abstract
Name classes intelligently	An indirection should have a meaning