Managing Complexity of Enterprise Information Systems

Abstract

The complexity of modern software is not that much in the size of systems as it is in the “wires” — in the linkages and communication paths between system components. The inter-component linkages create dependencies between distributed components that are difficult to understand and manage. The difficulty is inflated by the fact that components are frequently developed and managed by separate teams and by various component providers.

This paper identifies main issues for successful management of complexity in large software projects. It uses the holon hypothesis to explain that all complex systems of a stable but evolvable character display hierarchic organization. The paper makes it clear that a complexity-aware architectural design paves the way for developing supportable systems. It makes it also clear that unless implementation is design-conformant and complexity-assured, the initial good intents may still result in an unsupportable system. Without rigorous project management, supported by tools able to compute and visualize complexity metrics, contemporary large software production risks delivering unsupportable systems.