Every experienced developer has a set of informal strategies that shapes how they design and write applications. These strategies are themselves shaped by the developer's past experiences and the obstacles that they have had to overcome in previous projects. While these developers might swear by their own strategies, this does not mean that their strategies have been fully vetted. The use of these strategies can also introduce inconsistent implementations between different projects and developers.
While the concept of design patterns dates back to the mid-80s, they did not gain popularity until the Gang of Four released their book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, published in 1994. The book's authors, Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides discuss the pitfalls of object-oriented programming...
