Dependency Structures Ñ Architectural Diagnoses and Therapies

Software systems evolve during their development. Even carefully designed systems change their internal structure over time, making it increasingly hard to add or change functionality. An important scaling aspect of software systems is the internal dependency structure. A good architect may have a concrete mental vision of a system and might be able to map this vision to dependencies, and vice versa. More often, caring for your dependencies will become a refactoring task, an engineer’s duty that does not immediately add customer value. This makes it hard to determine the right amount and time to spend effort on it. After some development effort has been spent, it becomes necessary to look at the system from a bird-eye’s perspective to uncover structural properties and decide about structural measures.