Digital Cement: Software Portfolio Architecture, Complexity, and Flexibility

This paper is about the relationship between an organization’s software portfolio architecture and its ability to make changes to it. Responding to business and technology changes often involves modifying the software portfolio and the speed and cost of making changes to the software portfolio is a measure of the system’s flexibility. The specific research question is: “How does software portfolio architecture affect software portfolio flexibility?” This research develops measures of architectural and component complexity and hypothesizes that these constructs affect one dimension of software portfolio flexibility: architectural flexibility. The hypotheses are tested by (1) collecting component and dependency data from a biopharmaceutical company’s software portfolio, (2) combining this data with survey, system instrumentation, and archive data, and then (3) estimating and interpreting multiple regression models. The general conclusions from the research are that both complexity at the component level and complexity at the architectural level affect software portfolio flexibility.