The DOI matches its Crossref record; 5 of the 5 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The Modular Structure of Complex Systems
Abstract
This paper discusses the organization of software that is inherently complex because of very many arbitrary details that must be precisely right for the software to be correct. We show how the software design technique known as information hiding, or abstraction, can be supplemented by a hierarchically structured document, which we call a module guide. The guide is intended to allow both designers and maintainers to identify easily the parts of the software that they must understand, without reading irrelevant details about other parts of the software. The paper includes an extract from a software module guide to illustrate our proposals.
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Citations
Cites
On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules
Parnas, D. L. (1972) · Communications of the ACM · doi:10.1145/361598.361623 · Cited by 4,704
Self-citationBrooks, F. P. (1975) · ACM SIGPLAN Notices · doi:10.1145/390016.808439 · Cited by 3,224
The mythical man-month: essays on software engineering
(1996) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.33-5142 · Cited by 2,452
Designing Software for Ease of Extension and Contraction
Parnas, D. L. (1979) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.1979.234169 · Cited by 702
Self-citationUsing Documentation as a Software Design Medium
Hester, S. D., Parnas, D. L., & Utter, D. F. (1981) · Bell System Technical Journal · doi:10.1002/j.1538-7305.1981.tb00304.x · Cited by 78
Self-citation
Cited by
Strategic flexibility in product competition
Sanchez, R. (1995) · Strategic Management Journal · doi:10.1002/smj.4250160921 · Cited by 1,497
An analysis of the requirements traceability problem
Gotel, O. C. Z., & Finkelstein, C. W. (2002) · Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering · doi:10.1109/icre.1994.292398 · Cited by 1,246
MacCormack, A., Rusnak, J., & Baldwin, C. Y. (2006) · Management Science · doi:10.1287/mnsc.1060.0552 · Cited by 718
Understanding and controlling software costs
Boehm, B. W., & Papaccio, P. N. (1988) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/32.6191 · Cited by 667
Salvador, F., Forza, C., & Rungtusanatham, M. (2002) · Journal of Operations Management · doi:10.1016/s0272-6963(02)00027-x · Cited by 481
Metadata
- Authors
- Parnas, D. L., Clements, P. C., & Weiss, D. M.
- Venue
- IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
- Published
- 1985-03
- Volume
- SE-11
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 259-266
- ISSN
- 0098-5589 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2132234187
- Cited by
- 366
- References
- 5
- FWCI
- 28.96
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Modular Structure of Complex Systems. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1109/tse.1985.232209
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- Parnas, D. L., Clements, P. C., & Weiss, D. M. (1985). The Modular Structure of Complex Systems. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. https://doi.org/10.1109/tse.1985.232209
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.