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Improving design decomposition (extended version)

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Formal Aspects of Computing

Abstract

Decomposing a system into subsystems is essential to the design of large software systems. Traditionally, it is performed intuitively without rigorously analyzing the system model. This makes it difficult to check the decomposition correctness, and risks creating subsystems that are either too tightly coupled or not cohesive enough. An aggravating factor is that traditionally classes are the atomic design units. In many cases, however, the same classes play a role in more than one subsystem, and partitioning them unbroken among the subsystems may increase coupling and reduce cohesion. We present an analytical approach that enables reasoning about early exploration of decomposition alternatives. In addition, we describe a visual notation for diagramming the composition of subsystems, and an automatic technique for suggesting good decompositions. A key to our approach is that individual relations, not classes, are the atomic design units. We illustrate the approach with examples and demonstrate its effectiveness on a commercial system. This paper is an extended version of previous work.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Afeka Tel Aviv Academic College of Engineering, Tel Aviv, Israel

    David Faitelson

  2. The Academic College Tel Aviv-Yaffo, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Shmuel Tyszberowicz

Authors
  1. David Faitelson
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  2. Shmuel Tyszberowicz
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to David Faitelson.

Additional information

Cliff Jones, Xuandong Li, and Zhiming Liu

This paper is a revised and extended version of a paper that was presented in [FT15]. This work has been partially supported by GIF (Grant No. 1131-9.6/2011).

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Faitelson, D., Tyszberowicz, S. Improving design decomposition (extended version). Form Asp Comp 29, 601–627 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00165-017-0428-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00165-017-0428-0

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