Week5_Bank and Slaughter (2000)_Xinyu

Banker and Slaughter (2000) initiates an effort to study the link between software design decisions and software enhancement outcomes. They examine under what conditions software structure is more beneficial than other conditions in terms of reduced enhancement costs and errors.

In specific, they introduce software structure as a moderator of the relationship between software enhancement outcomes and two properties of software, namely software volatility (the frequency of enhancement per unit of functionality) and total data complexity (the number of data elements per unit of functionality). While software volatility and total data complexity are proposed to be positively associated with software enhancement outcomes for intuitive reasons, higher levels of software structure are proposed to mitigate those impacts on the enhancement outcomes. This is because structured software allows maintainer to focus particular issues on only the particular parts after getting familiar with the software through the practice of frequent enhancement, and structured software can be easily simplified by structural decomposition, thus the enhancement costs and errors will be reduced. However, since excessively high levels of structure are also redundant and problematic, the paper also discusses optimal levels of structure for different types of software applications.

The empirical results confirm that higher levels of structure are more advantageous for software with higher volatility and complexity, in terms of reducing enhancement costs and errors. Empirical evidence also shows that the optimal level of structure increases with software volatility and complexity. Finally, the paper identifies application type as an indicator for predicting future volatility and complexity, so that an optimal level of structure can be achieved at an early stage.