mDSM: A transformative approach to enterprise software systems evolution

Abstract

The engineering of enterprise software systems suffers from an inherent lack of creativity and innovation and is often left to user-centric incremental changes that are not often disruptive enough for business needs. A design-driven approach to systems creates opportunities for transformative evolution of such systems that are both immediate and futuristic in their impact. Software systems stability can be maintained and monitored during evolution utilizing architectural-level, program-level, and information-level stability metrics. Despite increasing complexities involved in the design, development, and testing of such large-scale software systems, they are often predicated by simple techniques for decomposition, generalization, and specification. However, as always they are much more difficult to merge back together in order to rationalize the entire architecture for the levels of confidence necessary during testing, deployment, and commissioning of these systems. mDSM, an extension to Design Structure Matrix (DSM) approach to software systems design and testing, is a methodology developed by the authors to address design-driven rationalization of such complex software system architectures.