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On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules
Open accessAbstract
This paper discusses modularization as a mechanism for improving the flexibility and comprehensibility of a system while allowing the shortening of its development time. The effectiveness of a “modularization” is dependent upon the criteria used in dividing the system into modules. A system design problem is presented and both a conventional and unconventional decomposition are described. It is shown that the unconventional decompositions have distinct advantages for the goals outlined. The criteria used in arriving at the decompositions are discussed. The unconventional decomposition, if implemented with the conventional assumption that a module consists of one or more subroutines, will be less efficient in most cases. An alternative approach to implementation which does not have this effect is sketched.
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Cited by
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Herbsleb, J. D., & Mockus, A. (2003) · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · doi:10.1109/tse.2003.1205177 · Cited by 997
Using task context to improve programmer productivity
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Splitting the organization and integrating the code: Conway's law revisited
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Metadata
- Authors
- Parnas, D. L.
- Venue
- Communications of the ACM
- Published
- 1972-12
- Volume
- 15
- Issue
- 12
- Pages
- 1053-1058
- ISSN
- 0001-0782 (ISSN-L)
- 1557-7317
- OpenAlex
- W2134119432
- Cited by
- 4,704
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 43.98
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
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- Parnas, D. L. (1972). On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules. Communications of the ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/361598.361623
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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.
