Development of a method for solving the problem of it product configuration analysis

Abstract

The object of this study is the process of managing the configuration of an IT project. During the study, the problem of analyzing the configuration of an IT product was solved. Research in this area is mainly aimed at solving the problem of configuration analysis during the refactoring of a monolithic IT product into individual services or microservices. Questions about the methods of decomposing the description of the architecture of the developed IT product into separate functional configuration items (CI) remain almost unexplored. As a result of the study, a method has been developed that makes it possible to build in the form of a dendrogram all possible options for decomposing the description of the IT product architecture into separate CIs. Unlike existing ones, the proposed method takes into account the degree of repetition of CI descriptions. The method is based on a Smith Maknaoton's divisive algorithm for solving the clustering problem. For its use, when solving the problem, the method for determining the distance between two functional CIs was modified. The devised method passed an experimental test during the development of the functional task "Formation and maintenance of the individual plan of the scientific and pedagogical employee of the department". As CI, 10 functions of the task were considered. To define these functions, the descriptions of 12 entities in the problem database were used. As a result, a dendrogram was constructed with all possible options for decomposing the description of the task architecture into separate CIs. Using the results of the study, it is possible to distinguish separate functional CIs and CI groups, the descriptions of which are strongly similar to each other. This allows one to improve the quality of IT product development by assigning such CI groups to one and the same executor of the IT project. The reported results are used to form backlogs of the IT product and further distribute their elements among the executors of the IT project