Events - Colloquia & Seminars

CCIS Colloquium Spring 2005

Dependency Models to Manage Software Architecture

Speaker: Neeraj Sangal (Lattix Inc.)

Date: May 25, 2005

Talk: 12:00 p.m. 366 WVH

Abstract

This talk will present a Dependency Structure Matrix (DSM) based approach to specify and manage the architecture of large software systems. The system is decomposed into a hierarchy of subsystems with the dependencies between the subsystems presented in the form of a matrix.

This yields a number of key benefits: The adaptation of DSM is highly scalable compared to the directed graph approaches that are common today. The specification is precise and architectural violations can be checked automatically. Finally, there are a variety of matrix algorithms that can be applied to organize the matrix in a form that reflects the architecture and highlights patterns and problematic dependencies. The talk will show the actual application of this technique to a real open-source system to see how it can be used to discover, analyze and manage existing systems.

Biography

Neeraj Sangal is President of Lattix, Inc. Neeraj was previously founder and president of Tendril Software that pioneered synchronized UML models for Java. Tendril also applied the Demeter project approach for supporting model driven development. Tendril was acquired by BEA/WebGain. Prior to Tendril, Neeraj was the founder and chairman of Metrix Network Systems. Metrix was acquired by HP and Neeraj spent 2 years at HP managing a distributed software development team.

Joint work with Ev Jordan (Lattix) and Vineet Sinha (MIT) and Daniel Jackson (MIT).