Software Architecture Decoupling at Ericsson

In order to evaluate and increase modularity this paper combines a method for visualizing and measuring software architectures and two algorithms for decoupling. The combination is tested on a software system at Ericsson. Our analysis show that the system has one large cluster of components (18% of the system, a Core), all interacting with each other. By employing cluster and dominator analysis we suggest 19 dependencies to be removed in order to decouple the Core. Validating the analysis output with experts at Ericsson six of the suggested dependencies where deemed impossible to remove. By removing the remaining 13 dependencies Ericsson would improve the architecture of their system considerably, e.g. core size would go down to 5%.