email article printer friendly

Manage EA Through Dependencies
Use dependencies to create highly scalable models that enforce of the principles of enterprise architecture.

Enterprise Architect Summit, May 21, 2007

Neeraj Sangal President Lattix

Watch the video of the session! (Running time: 55 minutes)

How often have you seen a small innocuous change bring down a well-running, mission-critical system? You tweak a stored procedure in a database and suddenly your applications don't work correctly. To grasp enterprise architecture, you must understand disparate systems and how they relate to each other.

In this session, you will learn a highly scalable approach that utilizes inter-module dependencies to represent and visualize the architecture of complex systems. This technique relies on a dependency structure matrix (DSM) for its representation. The elements of enterprise architecture represented in DSM include databases, services, applications and configuration files. DSM allows you to understand not just individual applications and databases in your system but also the dependencies betwen them. This approach also highlights architectural weaknesses and helps you see how certain changes can propagate within the system.

About the Speaker
Neeraj Sangal is president of Lattix, a company specializing in software architecture management solutions and services. He has analyzed the architecture of many large software systems and pioneered the dependency structure matrix (DSM) in software architecture. DSM is the result of a joint effort between Sangal's team and MIT; it was first published in OOPSLA 2005. Prior to Lattix, Sangal was president of Tendril Software, which focused on model-driven development and synchronized UML models.