Advanced Principles of Component Design .ppt

Advanced Principles II Principles of Object-Oriented Component Design Increasing Complexity Complexity and Failure Software’s Chronic Crisis, Scientific American, September, 1994 Complexity dilutes Productivity Because complexity of software can grow geometrically with size... Coupling Coupling is the term used to describe the dependence of one software module upon another. When coupling is high, there are many dependencies between the modules. In a system with n modules, the coupling can be as high O n2 . Coupling – Impact of Change The impact of making a change to a module is a function of its coupling. Every module that depends upon the changed module must be inspected, compiled, tested, and redeployed. Moreover, the transitive closure of modules that depend upon a changed module must be recompiled, re-tested, and redeployed. That transitive closure can be as high as O n ; And since there are n such closures in the system… A system with a fully coupled architecture Dilution of Productivity As the application size grows, more and more effort is applied to dealing with coupled modules. At the knee of the curve more effort is applied to coupling than adding features. The effort expended to add new features drives the complexity upwards and drives the productivity downwards. So…Project effort increases geometrically with project size. … Project size increases Exponentially with time. Other costs of a highly coupled architecture Geometrically increasing compile time. Geometrically increasing unit test time. Componentization is infeasible. Making footprint and load-time issues unmanageable. Barrier to Components As footprint and load time grows, the desire to break the software into individual components -- that can be independently built, tested, and deployed -- increases. However, componentization depends critically upon being able to create subsystems that are independent. So long as coupling is high, and dependency cycles are rampan