1.1. Why Sitecore Helix?

The Sitecore Experience Platform lends itself to customer implementations with complex requirements through its robust data model, extensibility, and integration abilities. Solutions can span multiple servers/services including the core Content/Experience Management, XConnect, and Experience Commerce.

The amount of technical debt in these large, complex solutions will grow over time, and if not managed well, the cost and effort associated with adapting the solution to changing requirements will increase to a point where the cost of change is higher than the value the change provides to the business.

Figure: Cost of Change over Time

The reason for this increasing cost is the tendency for solutions to develop uncontrolled dependencies with high coupling between features in a code base, when necessary changes/refactoring are not made to properly implement requirements (a.k.a. technical debt).

These challenges are not unique to Sitecore. There are some well-established principles of software design that should be used when designing any software project. One of the key principles is to be very explicit about the dependencies between software modules. This makes the modules easier to code, test and maintain. The principles apply to any software project in any language, so they are equally applicable to Java as they are to .NET and Sitecore.

Sitecore Helix is an application of those principles into recommended practices and conventions for the Sitecore developers. They are practices which are optimized for the typical needs of a Sitecore implementation, which applied well will result in a modular architecture, with controlled dependencies, giving you more maintainable code and lowering the cost of change for your customer.

Figure: Lower Cost of Change over Time

Note

Principles of Package and Component Design

Some of the core solution architecture principles which guide Sitecore Helix are described in Chapter 28 of Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C# by Robert C. Martin.

The Architecture Principles Section of this document describes Sitecore Helix’s application of these, and The Package Principles Appendix provides a plain-language overview of the principles and how they relate to Sitecore Helix practices.