Article
Journal of Modern Project Management

Visualizing and Measuring Software Portfolio Architecture: A Power Utility Case

By: Robert Lagerström, Carliss Y. Baldwin and Alan MacCormack

Format:Print

Abstract

In this paper, we test a Design Structure Matrix (DSM) based method for visualizing and measuring software portfolio architectures. Our data is drawn from a power utility company, comprising 192 software applications with 614 dependencies between them. We show that the architecture of this system can be classified as a “core-periphery” system, meaning it contains a single large dominant cluster of interconnected components (the “Core”) representing 40% of the system. The system has a propagation cost of 44% and architecture flow through of 93%. This case and these findings add another piece of the puzzle suggesting that the method could be effective in uncovering the hidden structure in software portfolio architectures.

Keywords

Applications and Software; Infrastructure; Utilities Industry

Citation

Lagerström, Robert, Carliss Y. Baldwin, and Alan MacCormack. "Visualizing and Measuring Software Portfolio Architecture: A Power Utility Case." Special Issue on DSM Conference 2014. Journal of Modern Project Management 3, no. 2 (September–December 2015): 114–121.