Exploring the Structure of Complex Software Designs: An Empirical Study of Open Source and Proprietary Code

Alan   MacCormack; John  Rusnak; Carliss Y. Baldwin

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Article | Management Science | July 2006

Exploring the Structure of Complex Software Designs: An Empirical Study of Open Source and Proprietary Code

by Alan MacCormack, John Rusnak and Carliss Y. Baldwin

Keywords: Software; Design; Information; Online Technology;

Format: Print

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Citation:

MacCormack, Alan, John Rusnak, and Carliss Y. Baldwin. "Exploring the Structure of Complex Software Designs: An Empirical Study of Open Source and Proprietary Code." Management Science 52, no. 7 (July 2006).

About the Authors

Alan D. MacCormack

MBA Class of 1949 Adjunct Professor of Business Administration

Technology and Operations Management

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Carliss Y. Baldwin

William L. White Professor of Business Administration

Finance

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Course Overview Note | July 2014 (Revised August 2017)

FIELD Foundations

Anthony J. Mayo, Alan MacCormack, Teresa Amabile and Michael Norton

Citation:
Mayo, Anthony J., Alan MacCormack, Teresa Amabile, and Michael Norton. "FIELD Foundations." Harvard Business School Course Overview Note 415-011, July 2014. (Revised August 2017.) View Details

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Other Article | Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings | 2017

Designing an Agile Software Portfolio Architecture: The Impact of Coupling on Performance

Alan MacCormack and Robert Lagerstrom

The modern industrial corporation encompasses a myriad of different software applications, each of which must work in concert to deliver functionality to end-users. However, the increasingly complex and dynamic nature of competition in today’s product-markets dictates that this software portfolio be continually evolved and adapted, in order to meet new business challenges. This ability – to rapidly update, improve, remove, replace, and reimagine the software applications that underpin a firm’s competitive position – is at the heart of what has been called IT agility. Unfortunately, little work has examined the antecedents of IT agility, with respect to the choices a firm makes when designing its “Software Portfolio Architecture.”
We address this gap in the literature by exploring the relationship between software portfolio architecture and IT agility at the level of the individual applications in the architecture. In particular, we draw from modular systems theory to develop and test a series of hypotheses about how different types of coupling impact three specific dimensions of agility: the ability to update, remove and replace software applications in the firm’s portfolio. We test our hypotheses with data from a financial services firm, encompassing over 1,000 software applications and 3,000 dependencies between them. We capture data at two points in time, allowing us to identify changes in the software portfolio, and hence to develop robust measures of IT agility.

Keywords: Software; Design; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance Effectiveness;

Citation:
MacCormack, Alan, and Robert Lagerstrom. "Designing an Agile Software Portfolio Architecture: The Impact of Coupling on Performance." Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings (2017). (doi:10.5465/AMBPP.2017.297, ISSN 2151-6561.) View Details

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Other Article | Proceedings of the International Symposium on Engineering Secure Software and Systems (ESSoS)

Exploring the Relationship Between Architecture Coupling and Software Vulnerabilities

Robert Lagerstrom, Carliss Y. Baldwin, Alan MacCormack, Daniel J. Sturtevant, Lee Doolan, Robert Lagerstrom, Carliss Y. Baldwin, Alan MacCormack, Daniel J. Sturtevant and Lee Doolan

Employing software metrics, such as size and complexity, for predicting defects has been given a lot of attention over the years and proven very useful. However, the few studies looking at software architecture and vulnerabilities are limited in scope and findings. We explore the relationship between software vulnerabilities and component metrics (like code churn and cyclomatic complexity), as well as architecture coupling metrics (direct, indirect, and cyclic coupling). Our case is based on the Google Chromium project, an open source project that has not been studied for this topic yet. Our findings show a strong relationship between vulnerabilities and both component level metrics and architecture coupling metrics. 68% of the files associated with a vulnerability are cyclically coupled, compared to 43% of the non-vulnerable files. Our best regression model is a combination of low commenting, high code churn, high direct fan-out within the main cyclic group, and high direct fan-in outside of the main cyclic group.

Keywords: Security vulnerabilities; Software architecture; metrics; Software; Complexity; Measurement and Metrics;

Citation:

Lagerstrom, Robert, Carliss Y. Baldwin, Alan MacCormack, Daniel J. Sturtevant, and Lee Doolan. "Exploring the Relationship Between Architecture Coupling and Software Vulnerabilities." Proceedings of the International Symposium on Engineering Secure Software and Systems (ESSoS) 9th (2017): 53–69. (Part of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, ISSN 0302-9743.) View Details

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Exploring the Structure of Complex Software Designs: An Empirical Study of Open Source and Proprietary Code

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