Mastering GRASP Principles in Object-Oriented Design

This course is a deep, practical, and brutally honest guide to GRASP - not a theoretical overview and not a slide driven abstraction.

GRASP is one of the most misunderstood and misused foundations of object oriented design. Many developers hear the names of the principles, but almost nobody knows how to apply them correctly, how they conflict, and how real design decisions are actually made. This course fixes that.

You will not just learn what each GRASP principle is.

You will learn how to think like a designer.

What makes this course different

This is not a definitions course.
This is a decision making course.

You will see:

• Why GRASP is more fundamental than SOLID

• Why many "best practices" directly violate GRASP

• Why blindly following principles creates worse designs

• How professional architects actually balance trade-offs

Every principle is explained through:

• Clear mental models

• Real domain driven examples

• Explicit anti-patterns

• Live refactoring and demos

• Architectural context, not isolated classes

What you will learn

You will master responsibility assignment, which is the core skill behind all good object oriented systems.

Specifically, you will learn how to:

• Identify the true Information Expert in a domain model instead of creating fake experts and data classes

• Decide when Low Coupling is more important than perfect responsibility placement

• Avoid God Controllers and correctly map system events to controllers

• Design classes with High Cohesion and detect cohesion violations early

• Replace conditionals with Polymorphism only when it actually improves the design

• Use Pure Fabrication without turning your system into a service soup

• Apply Indirection to reduce coupling without destroying clarity

• Protect unstable parts of the system using Protected Variations and abstractions

Each topic includes:

• Correct examples

• Incorrect examples

• Clear explanation of why one design fails and the other works

Beyond individual principles

GRASP principles do not work in isolation. This course explicitly teaches how they interact.

You will understand:

• Why Information Expert often conflicts with Low Coupling

• Why Polymorphism and Protected Variations reinforce each other

• How Controller decisions impact cohesion and coupling across layers

• How to choose the dominant principle when rules conflict

This is the part most courses completely ignore.

GRASP in real architecture

GRASP is not just about classes.

You will see how it applies across architectural layers:

• Domain layer: responsibility, behavior, and modeling

• Application layer: orchestration and control flow

• Infrastructure layer: boundaries, indirection, and change isolation

• Clear cases where GRASP should not be applied at all

You will stop misusing GRASP where it does not belong.

GRASP vs SOLID vs GoF

This course clearly explains:

• What problems GRASP actually solves

• Why SOLID came later and builds on GRASP ideas

• How GoF patterns emerge naturally from GRASP decisions

• How to map GRASP principles to SOLID and GoF without cargo culting

After this section, design principles will finally make sense as a system, not a checklist.

Who this course is for

This course is ideal if you:

• Write object oriented code but feel your designs degrade over time

• Know SOLID but struggle to apply it consistently

• Want to move from "code that works" to code that lasts

• Aim to think like a senior engineer or software architect

• Are tired of vague advice and want clear design reasoning

Outcome

After completing this course, you will:

• Design classes with confidence

• Explain and defend your design decisions

• Recognize bad designs immediately

• Apply GRASP naturally, not mechanically

• Write systems that are easier to change, test, and extend

This course does not teach rules.

It teaches judgment.

If you want to truly understand object oriented design at its core, this is the course you have been looking for.