Components Should Be Focused, Independent, Reusable, Small & Testable (FIRST)

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Whether it’s a client or server-side component, a Node module or a piece of visual UI, components that are large are inherently more complex to maintain than those than are small.

In fact, the secret to efficiently building ‘large’ things is generally to avoid building them in the first place. Instead, compose your large thing out of smaller, more focused pieces. This makes it easier to see how the small thing fits within the broader scope of your large thing. These concepts apply to existing ways of doing things, including Web Components.

Focus and modularity has worked to some degree of success in the Node community and is equally as valuable across other parts of our field for a few reasons:

On the whole, approaching components with modularity and a focus in mind increases reuse, eases maintenance and improves extensibility. Diligence does need to be taken with making something ‘focused’ however.

If you’re building components to be shared with the community or even just your team, ask yourself if features in your API will be used by 90% of users. If so, it’s likely pretty core functionality and should stay. If a feature it going to be used by the 10%, it should probably be a separate component or module. Avoid code bloat.

Some may read this and think, "Great!.. but practically speaking modularity from the get-go is not always possible". This is fine. Some developers find it more feasible to build an integrated solution first and then extract out useful modules. This can save time on public interfaces that might turn out to be wrong, but ultimately leads to the same end-goal: having a collection of components that can be reused in future projects.

When you’re trying to build a component, whether it’s visual or non-visual try to keep in mind five things:

Keep it (F)ocused.

Keep it (I)ndependent.

Keep it (R)eusable.

Keep it (S)mall.

Keep it (T)estable.

or in short, FIRST.

~ Addy

With special thanks to Pascal Hartig, Sindre Sorhus and Stephen Sawchuk for their review & Pascal Precht for suggesting the addition of the (T) for testable to FIRST.