Question

Often when I create new classes, I first create a new interface. I name the methods of my interface exactly as I would like them to behave. A colleague of mine prefers to have these method names being more abstract, ie: areConditionsMet(). The reason, he wants to hide the ‘implementation details’.

IMO implementation details are different from the expected behavior. Could anyone perhaps give more insight. My goal is to reach a common ground with my colleague.

Answer 1

Your method names should describe what the method does, but not how it does it. The example you gave is a pretty poor method name, but it’s better than isXGreatherThan1AndLessThan6(). Without knowing the details about what it should do, I would say that it should be specific to the problem at hand, but general enough that the implementation could change without affecting the name itself, i.e., you don’t want the name of the method to be brittle. An example might be isTemperatureWithinRange() – that describes what I’m checking but doesn’t describe how it’s accomplished. The user of the method should be confident that the output will reflect whether the temperature is within a certain range — whether this is supplied as an argument or defined by the contract of the class, is immaterial.