Informatică economică (Jan 2012)
Software Architecture Coupling Metric for Assessing Operational Responsiveness of Trading Systems
Abstract
The empirical observation that motivates our research relies on the difficulty to assess the performance of a trading architecture beyond a few synthetic indicators like response time, system latency, availability or volume capacity. Trading systems involve complex software architectures of distributed resources. However, in the context of a large brokerage firm, which offers a global coverage from both, market and client perspectives, the term distributed gains a critical significance indeed. Offering a low latency ordering system by nowadays standards is relatively easily achievable, but integrating it in a flexible manner within the broader information system architecture of a broker/dealer requires operational aspects to be factored in. We propose a metric for measuring the coupling level within software architecture, and employ it to identify architectural designs that can offer a higher level of operational responsiveness, which ultimately would raise the overall real-world performance of a trading system.
