There are many best practices and principles figured out by developers and architects for object oriented design. Robert Martin has intelligently put a subset of these good practices together, and gave them acronym SOLID which helps easy remembrance.

Single responsibility principle: A class should handle only one single responsibility and have only one reason for change. For example a class “Employee” should not change if there a change in project or some reporting details.

Open Closed principle: Code should be open for extension but closed for modification. If you want to add a new type of report in the system, you should not be changing any existing code. More here

Liskov substitution principle: “objects in a program should be replaceable with instances of their subtypes without altering the correctness of that program.” So if we have Employee class, which is extended by Manager. We should be able to use Manager instead of Employee and all the Employee methods like calculate Salary, generate annual report etc should work without any issues. Say if there is an object like “ContractWorker” that does not support a few functions of Employee like annual report, one should be careful not to make it subtype of Employee.

Interface Segregation principle: “no client should be forced to depend on methods it does not use”. Coming back to previous example, if “ContractWorker” does not need to support annual report, we should not force it to implement an iEmployee interface. We should break the interfaces say iReport and iEmployee, iEmployee can extent iReport and iContractWorker should implement only iReport. iReport can further be divided into reporting types if required.

Dependency Inversion principle: This one seems to be one of my favorite as I have written about it here, here, here and here. This one indeed is one of the most important design patterns which can be followed to make the code loosely coupled and hence making it more maintainable (golden rule- low coupling + high cohesiveness). In traditional programming, when a high level method calls a low level method, it needs to be aware of the low level method at compile time, whereas using DI we can make high level method depend on an abstraction or interface and details of implementation will be provided at run time, hence giving us freedom to use which implementation to be used. Coming back to my previous example, I can have multiple implementations of Employee Reporting, iReport. Some implementation need and excel report, other might need a PDF reporting, which can be decided at runtime.