Visualizing and Measuring Software Portfolio Architecture: A Flexibility Analysis

DSM 14 Proceedings of the 16th International DSM conference: Risk and Change management in complex systems

Year: 2014
Editor: Marle, F.; Jankovic, M.; Maurer, M.; Schmidt, D. M.; Lindemann, U.
Author: Lagerstr
Series: DSM
Section: System Architecture and Product Modularity
Page(s): 65-74

Abstract

In this paper, we test a Design Structure Matrix (DSM) based method for visualizing and measuring software portfolio architectures, and use our measures to predict the costs of architectural change. Our data is drawn from a biopharmaceutical company, comprising 407 architectural components with 1,157 dependencies between them. We show that the architecture of this system can be classified as a “core-periphery” system, meaning it contains a single large dominant cluster of interconnected components (the “Core”) representing 32% of the system. We find that the classification of software applications within this architecture, as being either Core or Peripheral, is a significant predictor of the costs of architectural change. In regression tests, we show that this measure has greater predictive power than prior measures of coupling used in the literature.

Keywords: Design structure matrices, Software architecture, Flexibility, and Software application portfolio