Bulldozer00's Blog

Assume that the figure below represents the software architecture within one of your flagship products. Also assume that each of the 6 software components are comprised of N non-trivial SLOC (Source Lines Of Code) so that the total size of the system is 6N SLOC. For the third assumption, pretend that a new, long term,  adjacent market opens up for a “channel 1” subset of your product.

To address this new market’s need and increase your revenue without a ton of investment, you can choose to instantiate the new product from your flagship. As shown in the figure below, if you do that, you’ve reduced the complexity of your new product addition by 1/3 (6N to 4N SLOC) and hence, decreased the ongoing maintenance cost by at least that much (since maintainability is a non-linear function of software size).

Nevertheless, your new product offering has two unneeded software components in its design: the “Sample Distributor” and the “Multi-Channel Integrator”. Thus, if as the diagram below shows, you decide to cut out the remaining fat (the most reliable part in a system is the one that’s not there – because it’s not needed), you’ll deflate your long term software maintenance costs even further. Your new product portfolio addition would be 1/3 the original size (6N to 2N SLOC) of your flagship product.

If you had the authority, which approach would you allocate your resources to? Would you leave it to chance? Is the answer a no brainer, or not? What factors would prevent you from choosing the simpler two component solution over the four component solution? What architecture would your new customers prefer? What would your competitors do?