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Cited by 366

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

Parnas, D.L., Clements, P.C., Weiss, D.M.·1985·IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering

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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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
The paper
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.