granularity

More on Architectural Granularity

Peter Cripps architecture

I published this post on architectural granularity just over two years ago and have been made aware of a research paper published on this topic last year: Weber, M.; Wondrak, C. (2012) Measuring the Influence of Project Characteristics on Optimal Software Project Granularity in: Proceedings of the 20th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS). The people responsible for the paper are working on a web-based service to make the tools from the project available for software architects. You can find a preview/demo here.

Architectural Granularity

Peter Cripps architecture ,

There’s an old joke about defining granularity:Granularity is a bit like pornography, it’s hard to define but you know it when you see it.

The whole topic of granularity of software components is important to the Software Architect for a number of reasons:

  • If you are creating too many fine-grained components then you are probably not doing architecture but design.
  • As I discussed previously, getting components at the right level of granularity is important when it comes to placing those components (on nodes) and satisfying non-functional requirements such as availability and performance.
  • The granularity of components impacts performance. Too many fine-grained components will probably result in increased traffic on the network because the client using the component must make several queries to complete a task or get the information it needs.
  • Generally speaking, the coarser grained a component the more likely it is to have a direct correlation to something the business finds useful (e.g. a ‘Reservation’ component that handles all aspects of allowing a customer to reserve a room is more useful than one that ‘finds a vacant room’).

The terms “fine-grained”, “medium-grained” and “coarse-grained” are frequently used to describe architectural components (or indeed services) but there seems to be no common definition for these terms. This leads to confusion and ambiguity in their use. Whilst there is no agreed definition of what these terms mean there does seem to be a consensus that granularity is about more than just the number of operations an interface on a component has. Everware-CBDI (see their June 2005 edition which is only available via subscription) suggests that other factors might be (and I’m simplifying here):

  • The number of components (C) in the directed-acyclic-graph (DAG) that are invoked through a given operation on that components interface.
  • The function points (F) for each component.
  • The number of database tables (D) created, read, updated or deleted.

So one measure of granularity (G) might be:

G = C + F + D

Put simply, if a component is self-contained (C = 1), has a single function point (F = 1) and updates a single entry in a database (D = 1) it will have a granularity of ‘3’. Such a ‘component’ is going to be something like a class ‘Integer’ with a single operation such as ‘increment’ which adds one to the previous value. Whilst such a component may be infinitely reusable it is not particularly useful from an architectural (or business) standpoint. We could honestly call such a component ‘fine-grained’. At the other extreme a CRM system will probably have C, F and D each equal to several thousand giving it a granularity in the tens of thousands. Again, from an architectural standpoint, this is not very useful. There is not much we can do with such a ‘component’ other than observe it is (very) coarse-grained. I suggest that we architects are more likely to be interested in creating, and (re)using components that sit somewhere in between these extremes (maybe in the low 100’s region using this measure of granularity).

What we are actually talking about here is what ZapThink refer to as ‘functional granularity’ (as opposed to ‘interface granularity’) that is, granularity of the component itself rather than the granularity of any interfaces the component may expose. For the architect it is getting this functional granularity right that is most important. The coarser the (functional) granularity of the component the more likely it is to have a useful business context. So a ‘Reservation’ component that deals with all aspects of reserving a room for a customer (i.e. takes the dates, room preferences, hotel location, customer loyalty status etc) and finds a sutable room is a useful component at both an architectural level (i.e it addresses the points I started with above) as well as a business level (i.e. it is understandable by the business and can therefore be mapped to business users requirements).

When composing systems into components working out what level of granularity you need is a key aspect of creating the systems architecture so you have the right number of components that are most useful in both an architectural as well as business context.

On Lego, Granularity, Jamie Oliver and Architecture

Peter Cripps architecture, creativity , , ,

There’s a TV program running here in the UK called Jamie’s Dream School where the chef, entrepreneur, restaurateur and Sainsbury’s promoter Jamie Oliver brings together some of Britain’s most inspirational individuals (Robert Winston, Simon Callow, Rankin and Rolf Harris to name but four) to see if they can persuade 20 young people who’ve left school with little to show for the experience to give education a second chance. The central theme seems to be one of hands-on student involvement and live demos, the more outrageous the better. The highlight so far being Robert Winston hacking away at rats and pigs with scalpels and a circular saw resulting in several students vomiting in the playground.This set me thinking about how best to demonstrate software architecture to a bunch of students of a similar age to those in the Jamie Oliver program for a talk I gave at a UK university last week. Much has been written about the analogy between LEGO (R) and services (see this article from Zapthink and another from ZDNet for example). Okay it may not be quite as imaginative as pig carcasses being hacked about but LEGO was the best I had at hand! Here’s how the demo works:

  1. First I give them my favourite defnition of architecture, namely: Architects take existing components and assemble them in interesting and important ways. (Seth Godin).
  2. Then I invite an unsuspecting candidate to come and assemble the body (importantly excluding the wheels) of a car out of LEGO (actually Duplo as its bigger) making a big thing of tipping a bag of bricks out onto the table. This they usually do without too much hassle, the key learning point being that they have created an “interesting” construct out of “existing components”.
  3. I then ask them to add some wheels and tip out a bag of K’NEX (R). As I’m sure even non-parents know K’NEX and LEGO are essentially different “systems” and the two don’t (easily) connect to each other. This usually ends up in bemused looks and a good deal of fiddling around with wheels and bricks trying to figure out how to make the two systems connect to each other.

Depending on how much time and energy you have as well as the attention span of the students there are lots of great learning points to be made here. In order of increasing depth these are:

  1. LEGO (components) have a well defined interface and can easily be assembled in lots of interesting ways.
  2. K’NEX is a different system and has been designed with a different interface. K’NEX and LEGO were not designed to work with each other. One of the jobs of an architect is to watch out for incompatible interfaces and figure out ways of making them work with each other. This is possibly done using a third party product e.g Sellotape (R). I guess an extension to this demo could be a roll of this.
  3. It may be in the component providers interest to use different interfaces as it results in vendor lock-in which means you have to keep going back to that vendor for more components,
  4. Granularity (i.e. in the case of LEGO the number of “nobbles”) is important. Small bricks (few nobbles, fine-grained) may be very reusable but you need lots and lots of them to do anything interesting. Conversely LEGO have now taken to quite specialized pieces (not “bricks” any more but large-grained pieces) that perform one function well (the LEGO rocket for example) but cannot be reused so easily. The optimum for re-usability is somewhere in-between these two.
  5. LEGO may be aimed at children who, with relatively little expertise or training, may be able to assemble interesting things but they are not about to build LEGOland. For that you need an architect!
  6. Finally, if you are feeling really mean, disassemble the lovingly built construction of your student then ask her to re-build it in exactly the same way. Chances are that even for a relatively simple system they won’t be able to. What might have helped was some type of document that described what they had done.

I’m sure there are other interesting analogies to be drawn but I’ll finish by saying that this is not quite as trivial as it sounds. Not only was this a good learning exercise for my students I happen to know a client who is using building blocks like LEGO to help their architects architect systems. The key thing it helps demonstrate is the importance of collaboration in assembling such systems.