This is a deep question probably for many, probably not. But I’m just writing it for my future me. How to know when you are dealing with a God Object this is from the Rails jargon not exactly that I want to focus in any piece of Ruby code. First let me make Google define what is a God object: In object-oriented programming, a god object is an object that knows too much or does too much. The god object is an example of an anti-pattern.

That definition seems kinda vague, probably we keep adding stuffs to our User model and keep telling ourselves that it doesn’t do too much or that it doesn’t know too much. Here I came with some items that will hint you if you have a God Object in case you don’t want to accept it.

  • public: Why is the use of this a hint? Well that implies that probably you don’t know where your public interface starts and where does it ends which should hints you that your class is doing too much.
  • private: Not exactly the use of it; but use it more than once? Yes I’ve seem that.
  • Lines of code: This is a no brainer
  • Could you name what is it that your class do without using ‘and’s if not then probably your class is doing too much
  • More than 6 lines methods
  • More private methods than public ones

This are just some of the things I can see at a glance; there are ways to solve some of this problems notably this article talks about it:

If I’m missing any heuristic for finding God Objects, please do share them in the comments.