The modern industrial firm increasingly relies on software to support its competitive position. However, the uncertain … and dynamic nature of today's global marketplace dictates that this software be continually evolved and adapted, to meet … new business challenges. This ability – to rapidly update, improve, remove, replace, and reimagine the software …

. However, we lack a formal theory and model of modularity and software evolution, which can be used for description, prediction … by looking at the design evolution of two software product platforms through the modeling lens of design structure …-world modularization activities in one case allowed for different rates of evolution in different software modules and in another case …

software products. We use design structure matrices (DSMs) to map dependencies between the elements of a design and define … software products--the Linux operating system and the Mozilla Web browser--that were developed via contrasting modes of … given recent moves to release proprietary software into the public domain. These moves are likely to fail unless the product …

and demonstrate its application to a large sample of software releases. Our methodology is based upon directed network …. Applying our methodology to a sample of 1286 software releases from 17 applications, we find that the majority of releases …