Scholars have posited that the architecture of a system drives its lifecycle properties. For example, Moses [1] represents “generic architectures” as networks of resource flows, which he states are related to flexibility and controllability in systematic ways. This study aims to investigate these claims empirically in the context of software systems. We compare and contrast the architectures of two distinct software packages at different levels of abstraction by computing structural metrics of laterality and verticality derived from Moses’ work. Next, we investigated the relationship between these structural metrics and Moses’ proposed measures of flexibility and controllability, as well as new measures that we propose. We found that metrics for flexibility and controllability vary with Moses’ generic architectures. In the case of control flow networks, these metrics vary in the manner Moses predicts; however, when these metrics are applied to dependency networks, we found a relationship that is opposite to what was expected. This implies that measures of system lifecycle properties depend strongly on the network representation of the system used (e.g., dependency vs. control flow), thus requiring different approaches to measuring system properties.