Productivity = Application Partitioning

The number of message paths in an unpartitioned system is O*O*M where O is the number of objects and M is the average number of methods per object.

• A 400 class Visual Basic system has an average number of methods per class of 43. The total number of message paths is 6,880,000. The system is typically inflexible and not easily maintainable.. It should be partitioned into a system with less than 100 components with an average of 23 methods per class and 3 lines of code per method.

Improperly partitioned object systems are not maintainable, reusable, or distributable.

References

• Jeff Sutherland. The Object Technology Architecture: Business Objects for Corporate Information Systems. Proceedings of the OOPSLA'95 Workshop on Business Object Design and Implementation. Springer-Verlag (in press).
• Object Oriented Ltd. OOPSLA'96 Workshops. Personal communication. 1996.
• Steve Alpert. Personal communication. IDX Systems Corporation, 1997.