Interface Implementation Pair

The practice of taking every class and pairing it with an interface. So as a result you see pairs of things - maybe ICustomer and Customer or Customer and CustomerImpl. In many ways it echoes the C/C++ habit of header files for each class, although in this case the interfaces and implementations are actually separate types.

The advantage of this approach is that you can completely substitute anything at any point by providing another implementation of the interface.

This isn't, however, a technique that I've ever much liked. Using interfaces when you aren't going to have multiple implementations is extra effort to keep everything in sync (although good IDEs help). Furthermore it hides the cases where you actually do provide multiple implementations.

As often is the case the trade-offs are different depending on whether you are writing application classes or libraries. In an application if you ever need an interface where you don't have one you can just do Extract Interface and you're done. With published libraries your users don't get that fast feedback so it's much more useful to make your published types interfaces. However just mimicking the implementation classes in your PublishedInterfaces is rarely the best move. Interfaces should be designed around your clients' needs, often these don't match the implementation.