Avoid abstractions if you can

  • 31 January 2023
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This tip is closely related to : Avoid type concepts if you can.

An abstraction is a noun concept for a phenomenon or situation viewed in general, as opposed to: viewed as applying to particular cases. Broadly speaking, abstractions are theory. Particular cases are what you come across in practice. Here are a few abstractions:

Abstractions are great for wording general guidelines or policies:

"In situations of high demand, branch desk must take all necessary measures to ensure maximum availability.”

"Customer privacy must be guaranteed during the completion of every customer transaction.”

But abstractions are not good for business rules. Business rules must be practicable. They must really tell people what they should do in a given situation.

One big difference is that abstractions don't have a plural form, whereas things applied to multiple cases usually do have a plural form. In other words: business rules work better with countable things, and abstractions are not countable. Contrast:

For abstractions that are names of individual concepts (left), it is often possible to find a "countable” noun concept (right) that is a better alternative:

Here are some abstractions that you can view as a general concept but also as an individual concept:

With this type of abstraction, if you are looking for a countable alternative, you usually need some more creativity. You may need to invent a unary or binary verb concept. If you already have rules in the area, these rules probably need to be completely rewritten:

The example with the is in-high-demand unary verb concept is discussed in more detail in Example 4 of Stepping stones.

An abstraction like car maintenance could be perfectly all right if you only have rules with ‘car maintenance’ that talk about ‘car maintenance’ in a general way, not rules that go into what actually happens during car maintenance.

You could have scheduling rules that just mention ‘car maintenance’ as a reason why cars are unavailable to clients at certain times. They are an example of “rules that just talk about car maintenance in a general way”.


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