Microsoft.NET

Alan D. MacCormack; Kerry  Herman

Case | HBS Case Collection | March 2002 (Revised August 2002)

Microsoft.NET

Abstract

Set in the summer of 2000, following the unveiling of Microsoft's .NET initiative to the public. Three of the key figures in .NET's development are considering the next steps they would have to take to keep the initiative moving forward. Specifically, the challenges they face include the retirement of a key executive sponsor and the need to make major changes across many of Microsoft's core products. The protagonists must come up with a process and an organizational structure to keep the initiative moving forward.

Keywords: Software; Growth and Development Strategy; Change Management; Talent and Talent Management; Policy; Business Model; Computer Industry; Web Services Industry;

Format: Print

26 pages

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Citation:

MacCormack, Alan D., and Kerry Herman. "Microsoft.NET." Harvard Business School Case 602-086, March 2002. (Revised August 2002.)

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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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.

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Microsoft.NET

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Faculty & Research

Microsoft.NET

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