Week5_Subramanyam et al (2012)_Xue Guo

In Search of Efficient Flexibility: Effects of Software Component Granularity on Development Effort, Defects, and Customization Effort

This paper mainly examines the relationship between software component design dimensions and software development outcomes in the context of model-driven, component-based software development (MDCD). It explores how different software design dimensions affect the trade-off between efficiency and flexibility.

The authors proposed that component granularity design (fine-grained & coarse-grained) decision plays an important role in the relationship between realized development efficiency and flexibility, i.e. the coarse-grained component would be associated with greater flexibility but less efficiency. The paper also proposes that mediating effect of in-process defects between component granularity and the development and customization efforts.

This paper empirically tests the effects of component granularity on development efficiency and flexibility from a sample of 92 data. The empirical models contain three dependent variables: in-process defects, development effort and customization effort. And the main independent variables include three measures of the component granularity: data elements, data layer interfaces and internal interfaces. The paper uses three-stage least squares regressions (3SLS) to address the simultaneity among certain measures and seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) to examine consistency of results. And it tests the hypothesis by conducting join tests for three measures of the component granularity. The empirical results support all of the author previous hypothesis.

The contribution of this paper is that it provides three measures of component granularity which match with the generic structural complexity dimensions and empirically establish the importance of component granularity design decision on the trade-offs between efficiently and flexibility.