Sustainable Software Architecture

10Refining Modularity

Throughout the discussion of layer architecture, public interfaces, pattern languages, and cycles detailed in the previous chapters, the questions we repeatedly ask are: What are the tasks of the building blocks involved? Are the responsibilities assigned in a meaningful way? The question of modularity is therefore a constant part of our thinking, even when we are investigating other aspects of a system.

Verifying modularity

In order to assess how well a development team paid attention to modularity, the analysis should review the basic rules for building a modular architecture (see Section 5.1). Building block modularity cannot be measured directly using a single metric, but you can still assess it using metrics such as ...