May 1996

ACM, Classic of the Month

On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules

D.L. Parnas
Carnegie-Mellon University
Reprinted from Communications of the ACM, Vol. 15, No. 12, December 1972 pp. 1053 - 1058 Copyright ©
1972, Association for Computing Machinery Inc.

This is a digitized copy derived from an ACM copyrighted work. It is not guaranteed to be an accurate copy
of the author's original work.

This paper discusses modularization as a mechanism for improving the flexibility and
comprehensibility of a system while allowing the shortening of its development time. The effectiveness
of a "modularization" is dependent upon the criteria used in dividing the system into modules. A
system design problem is presented and both a conventional and unconventional decomposition are
described. It is shown that the unconventional decompositions have distinct advantages for the goals
outlined. The criteria used in arriving at the decompositions are discussed. The unconventional
decomposition, if implemented with the conventional assumption that a module consists of one or more
subroutines, will be less efficient in most cases. An alternative approach to implementation which does
not have this effect is sketched.

Key Words and Phrases: software, modules, modularity, software engineering, KWIC index, software
design

CR Categories: 4.0

Introduction

A lucid statement of the philosophy of modular programming can be found in a 1970 textbook on the design
of system programs by Gouthier and Pont [1,10.23], which we quote below:

A well-defined segmentation of the project effort ensures system modularity. Each task forms a
separate, distinct program module. At implementation time each module and its inputs and
outputs are well-defined, there is no confusion in the intended interface with other system
modules. At checkout time the integrity of the module is tested independently; there are few
scheduling problems in synchronizing the completion of several tasks before checkout can
begin. Finally, the system is maintained in modular fashion, system errors and deficiencies can
be traced to specific system modules, thus limiting the scope of detailed error searching.

Usually nothing is said about the criteria to be used in dividing the system into modules. This paper will
discuss that issue and, by means of examples, suggest some criteria which can be used in decomposing a
system into modules.

A Brief Status Report

The major advancement in the area of modular programming has been the development of coding techniques
and assemblers which (1) allow one module to be written with little knowledge of the code in another
module, and (2) allow modules to be reassembled and replaced without reassembly of the whole system. This
facility is extremely valuable for the production of large pieces of code, but the systems most often used as
examples of problem systems are highly modularized programs and make use of the techniques mentioned
above.

Expected Benefits of Modular Programming

The benefits expected of modular programming are: (1) managerial_development time should be shortened
because separate groups would work on each module with little need for communication: (2) product
flexibility_it should be possible to make drastic changes to one module without a need to change others; (3)
comprehensibility_it should be possible to study the system one module at a time. The whole system can
therefore be better designed because it is better understood.

What Is Modularization?

Below are several partial system descriptions called modularizations. In this context "module" is considered
to be a responsibility assignment rather than a subprogram. The modularizations include the design decisions
which must be made before the work on independent modules can begin. Quite different decisions are
included for each alternative, but in all cases the intention is to describe all "system level" decisions (i.e.
decisions which affect more than one module).

Example System 1: A KWIC Index Production System

The following description of a KWIC index will suffice for this paper. The KWIC index system accepts an
ordered set of lines, each line is an ordered set of words, and each word is an ordered set of characters. Any
line may be "circularly shifted" by repeatedly removing the first word and appending it at the end of the line.
The KWIC index system outputs a listing of all circular shifts of all lines in alphabetical order.

This is a small system. Except under extreme circumstances (huge data base, no supporting software), such a
system could be produced by a good programmer within a week or two. Consequently, none of the
difficulties motivating modular programming are important for this system. Because it is impractical to treat
a large system thoroughly, we must go through the exercise of treating this problem as if it were a large
project. We give one modularization which typifies current approaches, and another which has been used
successfully in undergraduate class projects.

Modularization 1

We see the following modules:

Module 1: Input. This module reads the data lines from the input medium and stores them in core for
processing by the remaining modules. The characters are packed four to a word, and an otherwise unused
character is used to indicate the end of a word. An index is kept to show the starting address of each line.

Module 2: Circular Shift. This module is called after the input module has completed its work. It prepares
an index which gives the address of the first character of each circular shift, and the original index of the line
in the array made up by module 1. It leaves its output in core with words in pairs (original line number,
starting address).

Module 3: Alphabetizing. This module takes as input the arrays produced by modules I and 2. It produces
an array in the same format as that produced by module 2. In this case, however, the circular shifts are listed
in another order (alphabetically).

Module 4: Output. Using the arrays produced by module 3 and module 1, this module produces a nicely
formatted output listing all of the circular shifts. In a sophisticated system the actual start of each line will be
marked, pointers to further information may be inserted, and the start of the circular shift may actually not be
the first word in the line, etc.

Module 5: Master Control. This module does little more than control the sequencing among the other four
modules. It may also handle error messages, space allocation, etc.

It should be clear that the above does not constitute a definitive document. Much more information would
have to be supplied before work could start. The defining documents would include a number of pictures
showing core formats, pointer conventions, calling conventions, etc. All of the interfaces between the four
modules must be specified before work could begin.

This is a modularization in the sense meant by all proponents of modular programming. The system is
divided into a number of modules with well-defined interfaces; each one is small enough and simple enough
to be thoroughly understood and well programmed. Experiments on a small scale indicate that this is
approximately the decomposition which would be proposed by most programmers for the task specified.

Modularization 2

We see the following modules:

Module 1: Line Storage. This module consists of a number of functions or subroutines which provide the
means by which the user of the module may call on it. The function call CHAR(r,w,c) will have as value an
integer representing the cth character in the rth line, wth word. A call such as SETCHAR(rpv,c,d) will cause
the cth character in the wth word of the rth line to be the character represented by d (i.e. CHAR(r,w,c) = d).
WORDS(r) returns as value the number of words in line r. There are certain restrictions in the way that these
routines may be called; if these restrictions are violated the routines "trap" to an error-handling subroutine
which is to be provided by the users of the routine. Additional routines are available which reveal to the
caller the number of words in any line, the number of lines currently stored, and the number of characters in
any word. Functions DELINE and DELWRD are provided to delete portions of lines which have already been
stored. A precise specification of a similar module has been given in [3] and [8] and we will not repeat it
here.

Module 2: INPUT. This module reads the original lines from the input media and calls the line storage
module to have them stored internally.

Module 3: Circular Shifter. The principal functions provided by this module are analogs of functions
provided in module 1. The module creates the impression that we have created a line holder containing not
all of the lines but all of the circular shifts of the lines. Thus the function call CSCHAR(I,w,c) provides the
value representing the cth character in the wth word of the Ith circular shift. It is specified that (1) if i < j then
the shifts of line i precede the shifts of line j, and (2) for each line the first shift is the original line, the
second shift is obtained by making a one-word rotation to the first shift, etc. A function CSSETUP is
provided which must be called before the other functions have their specified values. For a more precise
specification of such a module see [8].

Module 4: Alphabetizer. This module consists principally of two functions. One, ALPH, must be called
before the other will have a defined value. The second, ITH, will serve as an index. ITH(i) will give the index
of the circular shift which comes ith in the alphabetical ordering. Formal definitions of these functions are
given [8].

Module 5: Output. This module will give the desired printing of set of lines or circular shifts.

Module 6: Master Control. Similar in function to the modularization above.

Comparison of the Two Modularizations

General. Both schemes will work. The first is quite conventional; the second has been used successfully in a
class project [7]. Both will reduce the programming to the relatively independent programming of a number
of small, manageable, programs.
Note first that the two decompositions may share all data representations and access methods. Our discussion
is about two different ways of cutting up what may be the same object. A system built according to
decomposition I could conceivably be identical after assembly to one built according to decomposition 2.
The differences between the two alternatives are in the way that they are divided into the work assignments,
and the interfaces between modules. The algorithms used in both cases might be identical. The systems are
substantially different even if identical in the runnable representation. This is possible because the runnable
representation need only be used for running; other representations are used for changing, documenting,
understanding, etc. The two systems will not be identical in those other representations.

Changeability. There are a number of design decisions which are questionable and likely to change under
many circumstances. This is a partial list.

1. Input format.

2. The decision to have all lines stored in core. For large jobs it may prove inconvenient or impractical to
keep all of the lines in core at any one time.

3. The decision to pack the characters four to a word. In cases where we are working with small amounts of
data it may prove undesirable to pack the characters; time will be saved by a character per word layout. In
other cases we may pack, but in different formats.

4. The decision to make an index for the circular shifts rather that actually store them as such. Again, for a
small index or a large core, writing them out may be the preferable approach. Alternatively, we may choose
to prepare nothing during CSSETUP All computation could be done during the calls on the other functions
such as CSCHAR.

5. The decision to alphabetize the list once, rather than either (a) search for each item when needed, or (b)
partially alphabetize as is done in Hoare's FIND [2]. In a number of circumstances it would be advantageous
to distribute the computation involved in alphabetization over the time required to produce the index.

By looking at these changes we can see the differences between the two modularizations. The first change is
confined to one module in both decompositions. For the first decomposition the second change would result
in changes in every module! The same is true of the third change. In the first decomposition the format of the
line storage in core must be used by all of the programs. In the second decomposition the story is entirely
different. Knowledge of the exact way that the lines are stored is entirely hidden from all but module 1. Any
change in the manner of storage can be confined to that module!

In some versions of this system there was an additional module in the decomposition. A symbol table module
(as specified in [3]) was used within the line storage module. This fact was completely invisible to the rest of
the system.

The fourth change is confined to the circular shift module in the second decomposition, but in the first
decomposition the alphabetizer and the output routines will also know of the change.

The fifth change will also prove difficult in the first decomposition. The output module will expect the index
to have been completed before it began. The alphabetizer module in the second decomposition was designed
so that a user could not detect when the alphabetization was actually done. No other module need be
changed.

Independent Development. In the first modularization the interfaces between the modules are the fairly
complex formats and table organizations described above. These represent design decisions which cannot be
taken lightly. The table structure and organization are essential to the efficiency of the various modules and
must be designed carefully. The development of those formats will be a major part of the module
development and that part must be a joint effort among the several development groups. In the second
modularization the interfaces are more abstract; they consist primarily in the function names and the numbers
and types of the parameters. These are relatively simple decisions and the independent development of
modules should begin much earlier.
Comprehensibility. To understand the output module in the first modularization, it will be necessary to
understand something of the alphabetizer, the circular shifter, and the input module. There will be aspects of
the tables used by output which will only make sense because of the way that the other modules work. There
will be constraints on the structure of the tables due to the algorithms used in the other modules. The system
will only be comprehensible as a whole. It is my subjective judgment that this is not true in the second
modularization.

The Criteria
Many readers will now see what criteria were used in each decomposition. In the first decomposition the
criterion used was to make each major step in the processing a module. One might say that to get the first
decomposition one makes a flowchart. This is the most common approach to decomposition or
modularization. It is an outgrowth of all programmer training which teaches us that we should begin with a
rough flowchart and move from there to a detailed implementation. The flowchart was a useful abstraction
for systems with on the order of 5,000-10,000 instructions, but as we move beyond that it does not appear to
be sufficient; something additional is needed.

The second decomposition was made using "information hiding" [41 as a criterion. The modules no longer
correspond to steps in the processing. The line storage module, for example, is used in almost every action
by the system. Alphabetization may or may not correspond to a phase in the processing according to the
method used. Similarly, circular shift might, in some circumstances, not make any table at all but calculate
each character as demanded. Every module in the second decomposition is characterized by its knowledge of
a design decision which it hides from all others. Its interface or definition was chosen to reveal as little as
possible about its inner workings.

Improvement in Circular Shift Module

To illustrate the impact of such a criterion let us take a closer look at the design of the circular shift module
from the second decomposition. Hindsight now suggests that this definition reveals more information than
necessary. While we carefully hid the method of storing or calculating the list of circular shifts, we specified
an order to that list. Programs could be effectively written if we specified only ( I ) that the lines indicated in
circular shift's current definition will all exist in the table, (2) that no one of them would be included twice,
and (3) that an additional function existed which would allow us to identify the original line given the shift.
By prescribing the order for the shifts we have given more information than necessary and so unnecessarily
restricted the class of systems that we can build without changing the definitions. For example, we have not
allowed for a system in which the circular shifts were produced in alphabetical order, ALPH is empty, and
ITH simply returns its argument as a value. Our failure to do this in constructing the systems with the second
decomposition must clearly be classified as a design error.

In addition to the general criteria that each module hides some design decision from the rest of the system,
we can mention some specific examples of decompositions which seem advisable.

1. A data structure, its internal linkings, accessing procedures and modifying procedures are part of a single
module. They are not shared by many modules as is conventionally done. This notion is perhaps just an
elaboration of the assumptions behind the papers of Balzer [9] and Mealy [10]. Design with this in mind is
clearly behind the design of BLISS [11].

2. The sequence of instructions necessary to call a given routine and the routine itself are part of the same
module. This rule was not relevant in the Fortran systems used for experimentation but it becomes essential
for systems constructed in an assembly language. There are no perfect general calling sequences for real
machines and consequently they tend to vary as we continue our search for the ideal sequence. By assigning
responsibility for generating the call to the person responsible for the routine we make such improvements
easier and also make it more feasible to have several distinct sequences in the same software structure.

3. The formats of control blocks used in queues in operating systems and similar programs must be hidden
within a "control block module." It is conventional to make such formats the interfaces between various
modules. Because design evolution forces frequent changes on control block formats such a decision often
proves extremely costly.
4. Character codes, alphabetic orderings and similar data should be hidden in a module for greatest
flexibility. 5. The sequence in which certain items will be processed should (as far as practical) be hidden
within a single module. Various changes ranging from equipment additions to unavailability of certain
resources in an operating system make sequencing extremely variable.

Efficiency and Implementation

If we are not careful the second decomposition will prove to be much less efficient than the first. If each of
the functions is actually implemented as a procedure with an elaborate calling sequence there will be a great
deal of such calling due to the repeated switching between modules. The first decomposition will not suffer
from this problem because there is relatively infrequent transfer of control between modules.

To save the procedure call overhead, yet gain the advantages that we have seen above, we must implement
these modules in an unusual way. In many cases the routines will be best inserted into the code by an
assembler; in other cases, highly specialized and efficient transfers would be inserted. To successfully and
efficiently make use of the second type of decomposition will require a tool by means of which programs
may be written as if the functions were subroutines, but assembled by whatever implementation is
appropriate. If such a technique is used, the separation between modules may not be clear in the final code.
For that reason additional program modification features would also be useful. In other words, the several
representations of the program (which were mentioned earlier) must be maintained in the machine together
with a program performing mapping between them.

A Decomposition Common to a Compiler and Interpretor for the Same Language

In an earlier attempt to apply these decomposition rules to a design project we constructed a translator for a
Markov algorithm expressed in the notation described in [6]. Although it was not our intention to investigate
the relation between compiling and interpretive translators of a language, we discovered that our
decomposition was valid for a pure compiler and several varieties of interpreters for the language. Although
there would be deep and substantial differences in the final running representations of each type of compiler,
we found that the decisions implicit in the early decomposition held for all.

This would not have been true if we had divided responsibilities along the classical lines for either a
compiler or interpretor (e.g. syntax recognizer, code generator, run time routines for a compiler). Instead the
decomposition was based upon the hiding of various decisions as in the example above. Thus register
representation, search algorithm, rule interpretation etc. were modules and these problems existed in both
compiling and interpretive translators. Not only was the decomposition valid in all cases, but many of the
routines could be used with only slight changes in any sort of translator.

This example provides additional support for the statement that the order in time in which processing is
expected to take place should not be used in making the decomposition into modules. It further provides
evidence that a careful job of decomposition can result in considerable carryover of work from one project to
another.

A more detailed discussion of this example was contained in [8].

Hierarchical Structure
We can find a program hierarchy in the sense illustrated by Dijkstra [5] in the system defined according to
decomposition 2. If a symbol table exists, it functions without any of the other modules, hence it is on level
1. Line storage is on level I if no symbol table is used or it is on level 2 otherwise. Input and Circular Shifter
require line storage for their functioning. Output and Alphabetizer will require Circular Shifter, but since
Circular Shifter and line holder are in some sense compatible, it would be easy to build a parameterized
version of those routines which could be used to alphabetize or print out either the original lines or the
circular shifts. In the first usage they would not require Circular Shifter; in the second they would. In other
words, our design has allowed us to have a single representation for programs which may run at either of two
levels in the hierarchy.
In discussions of system structure it is easy to confuse the benefits of a good decomposition with those of a
hierarchical structure. We have a hierarchical structure if a certain relation may be defined between the
modules or programs and that relation is a partial ordering. The relation we are concerned with is "uses" or
"depends upon." It is better to use a relation between programs since in many cases one module depends
upon only part of another module (e.g. Circular Shifter depends only on the output parts of the line holder
and not on the correct working of SKI WORD). It is conceivable that we could obtain the benefits that we
have been discussing without such a partial ordering, e.g. if all the modules were on the same level. The
partial ordering gives us two additional benefits. First, parts of the system are benefited (simplified) because
they use the services of lower levels. Second, we are able to cut off the upper levels and still have a usable
and useful product. For example, the symbol table can be used in other applications; the line holder could be
the basis of a question answering system. The existence of the hierarchical structure assures us that we can
"prune" off the upper levels of the tree and start a new tree on the old trunk. If we had designed a system in
which the "low level" modules made some use of the "high level" modules, we would not have the hierarchy,
we would find it much harder to remove portions of the system, and "level" would not have much meaning in
the system.

Since it is conceivable that we could have a system with the type of decomposition shown in version I
(important design decisions in the interfaces) but retaining a hierarchical structure, we must conclude that
hierarchical structure and "clean" decomposition are two desirable but independent properties of a system
structure.

Conclusion
We have tried to demonstrate by these examples that it is almost always incorrect to begin the decomposition
of a system into modules on the basis of a flowchart. We propose instead that one begins with a list of
difficult design decisions or design decisions which are likely to change. Each module is then designed to
hide such a decision from the others. Since, in most cases, design decisions transcend time of execution,
modules will not correspond to steps in the processing. To achieve an efficient implementation we must
abandon the assumption that a module is one or more subroutines, and instead allow subroutines and
programs to be assembled collections of code from various modules.

Received August 1971; revised November 1971

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