This paper describes a tutorial presentation aimed at explaining fundamental conditions for building supportable object-oriented distributed enterprise information systems. It concentrates on architectural design, managerial techniques, and engineering approaches for developing supportable systems. A supportable system is one that delivers desired functionality and satisfies other system qualities with understandable, maintainable and scalable design that minimizes object dependencies in the code.

We propose how to harness the complexity of large design models, manage large system production, ensure supportable architectural design, use metrics to measure supportability, take advantage of design patterns and frameworks, and manage forward and reverse-engineering cycles so that a measurably-supportable system will result.