Understandability

A class with the Multifaceted Abstraction smell has multiple aspects realized into the abstraction, increasing the cognitive load on the user. When a class has multiple responsibilities, it takes more time and effort to understand each responsibility, how they releate to each other in the abstraction, etc. This adversely affects its understandability.

Changeability & extensibility

When a class has multiple responsibilities, it is difficult to determine which members should be modified to support a change or enhancement. Further, a modification to a member may impact unrelated responsibilities within the same class; this in turn can have a ripple effect accross the entire design. For this reason, the amount of time and effort required to change or extend the class while still ensuring that the reulting ripple effect has no adverse impact on the correctness of the software is considerably greater. These factors negatively impact changeability and extensibility.

Reusability

Ideally, a well-formed abstraction that supports a single responsibility has the potential to be reused as a unit in a different context. When an abstraction has multiple responsibilities, the entire abstraction must be used even if only one of the responsibilities needs to be reused. In such a case, the presence of unnecessary responsibilities may become a costly overhead that must be addressed. Thus, the abstraction's reusability is compromised. Further, in an abstraction with multiple responsibilities, sometimes the responsibilities may be intertwined. In such a case, even if only a single responsibility needs to be reused, the overall behavior of the abstraction may be unpredicatable, again affecting its reusability.

Testability

Often, when a class has multiple responsibilities, these responsibilities may be tightly coupled to each other, making it difficult to test each responsibility separately. This can negatively impact the testability of the class.

Reliability

The effects of modification to a class with intertwined responsibilities may be unpredictable and lead to runtime problems. For instance, consider the case in which each responsibility operates on a seperate set of variables. When these variables are put together in a single abstraction, it is easy to mistakenly access the wrong variable, resulting in a runtime problem.

Related

• Important quality attributes and their definitions