This website contains the official supporting materials for the paper “Integration Complexity,” presented at the 36th Annual INCOSE International Symposium (IS2026). The symposium was held June 13-18 at the Pacifico Yokohama Conference Center in Yokohama, Japan.
The literature contains vast empirical evidence that software development has become more complex over recent years as engineering teams strive to develop more modular, feature-rich, and higher-performing software components. Consequently, accurately quantifying and tracking the evolving complexity of software components has become increasingly critical. While the software engineering community has conducted considerable research on developing complexity metrics to assess the internal complexity of software components, there is no evidence in the literature that indicates steps towards creating a metric to evaluate the complexity required to integrate two software components.
The paper outlines a proposal for a new software complexity metric, called Integration Complexity (NTC), a simple, quantifiable measure for evaluating such complexity. While the work presented focuses on application-level integration and is consequently oriented towards interfaces based on application programming interface contracts, we expect that future NTC proposals will include additional functional proposals for other integration types, such as data-level and message-based integration.
The plots SDG001 to SDG006 demonstrate initial exploratory results. They were generated in Wolfram Mathematica (Version 14.3) using synthetic datasets and depict the Integration Complexity Plane (ICP) under different conditions. The Synthetic Data Generator, the internal Java domain-specific language (DSL) developed to simplify configuration, and the datasets used in the study are publicly available to any researcher interested in reproducing the results.
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Icn. 360505011113033603