Of course, I'm not the first to notice that software (or, OO software, anyway) has the scale free property. These folks have done a bunch of interesting work on the scale-free nature of the object graph in running systems, and also in various static properties of code. I might just, though, be the first person to observe that the distributions are quantitatively different for different design methodologies.
What the Wellington group are trying to do is disprove what they call the Lego Hypothesis, that all software can be built out of lots of small interchangeable components. Instead, they claim, because of the scale-free nature of software, the biggest components in bigger systems will be bigger than the biggest ones in smaller systems. I'd read some of this research before, but had forgotten that--conciously, anyway--until reminded of it by Kent Beck. Thanks, Kent.
The story continues here.
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