Modeling Architectural Dependencies to Support Software Release Planning
Year: 2011
Editor: Eppinger, S. D., Maurer, M., Eben, K., Lindemann, U.
Author: Nord, R.L.; Ozkaya, I.; Brown, N.; Sangwan, R. S.
Section: Software Architectures
Page(s): 159-171
Abstract
Organizations building products or systems that rely on software continue to demand increasingly rapid innovation and development processes that enable them to adjust products and systems to emerging needs. Release planning is a key activity in managing these processes. An essential aspect of release planning is balancing the development of new capabilities to address user needs against investment in system infrastructure and architecture to enable flexibility and maintainability. Providing quantifiable insight and visibility into both the delivered capabilities as well as the emerging quality of the software architecture is essential to product success. In this paper, we describe our use of dependency structure and domain mapping matrices to model architectural dependencies. These dependencies provide insight into the value of the capabilities being delivered over total effort to better guide the process of release planning.
Keywords: Software architecture, iterative release planning, dependency analysis, Design Structure Matrix (DSM), Domain Mapping Matrix (DMM), software economics