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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T13:31:36+00:00

I’m in a project that takes the Single Responsibility Principle pretty seriously. We have

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I’m in a project that takes the Single Responsibility Principle pretty seriously. We have a lot of small classes and things are quite simple. However, we have an anemic domain model – there is no behaviour in any of our model classes, they are just property bags. This isn’t a complaint about our design – it actually seems to work quite well

During design reviews, SRP is brought out whenever new behaviour is added to the system, and so new behaviour typically ends up in a new class. This keeps things very easily unit testable, but I am perplexed sometimes because it feels like pulling behaviour out of the place where it’s relevant.

I’m trying to improve my understanding of how to apply SRP properly. It seems to me that SRP is in opposition to adding business modelling behaviour that shares the same context to one object, because the object inevitably ends up either doing more than one related thing, or doing one thing but knowing multiple business rules that change the shape of its outputs.

If that is so, then it feels like the end result is an Anemic Domain Model, which is certainly the case in our project. Yet the Anemic Domain Model is an anti-pattern.

Can these two ideas coexist?

EDIT: A couple of context related links:

SRP – http://www.objectmentor.com/resources/articles/srp.pdf
Anemic Domain Model – http://martinfowler.com/bliki/AnemicDomainModel.html

I’m not the kind of developer who just likes to find a prophet and follow what they say as gospel. So I don’t provide links to these as a way of stating “these are the rules”, just as a source of definition of the two concepts.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’d have to say “yes”, but you have to do your SRP properly. If the same operation applies to only one class, it belongs in that class, wouldn’t you say? How about if the same operation applies to multiple classes? In that case, if you want to follow the OO model of combining data and behavior, you’d put the operation into a base class, no?

    I suspect that from your description, you’re ending up with classes which are basically bags of operations, so you’ve essentially recreated the C-style of coding: structs and modules.

    From the linked SRP paper:
    “The SRP is one of the simplest of the principle, and one of the hardest to get right.“

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