MAINTENANCE COST OF A SOFTWARE DESIGN - A Value-Based Approach

Daniel Cabrero, Javier Garzás, Mario Piattini

2007

Abstract

Alternative valid software design solutions can give response to the same software product requirements. In addition, a great part of the success of a software project depends on the selected software design. However, there are few methods to quantify how much value will be added by each design strategy, and hence very little time is spent choosing the best design option. This paper presents a new approach to estimate and quantify how profitable is to improve a design solution. This will be achieved by estimating the maintenance cost of a software project using two main variables: The probability of change of each design artifact, and the cost associated to each change. Two techniques are proposed in this paper to support this approach: COCM (Change-Oriented Configuration Management) and CORT (Change-Oriented Requirement Tracing).

References

  1. Antoniol, G., Lokan, C., Caldiera, G. & Fiutem, R. (1999) A Function Point-Like Measure for Object-Oriented Software. Empirical Software Engineering, 4, 263 - 287.
  2. Bennet, K. H. & Rajlich, V. T. (2000) Software Maintenance and Evolution: a Roadmap. ICSE (Track on The Future of Software Engineering). Limerick, Ireland, Finkelstein A.
  3. Boehm, B. (2005) Value-Based Software Engineering: Overview and Agenda. Value-Based Software Engineering Springer.
  4. Boehm, B., Horowitz, E., Madachy, R., Reifer, D., Clark, B. K., Steece, B., Brown, A. W., Chulani, S. & Abts, C. (2000) Software Cost Estimation with Cocomo II Prentice Hall PTR.
  5. Briand, L. C., Emam, K. E., Surmann, D., Wieczorek, I. & Maxwell, K. D. (1999) An assessment and comparison of common software cost estimation modeling techniques. International Conference on Software Engineering Los Angeles, California, United States IEEE Computer Society Press.
  6. Cleland-Huang, J. & Denne, M. (2005) Financially informed requirements prioritization. International Conference on Software Engineering St. Louis, MO, USA ACM Press.
  7. Cleland-Huang, J., Zemont, G. & Lukasik, W. (2004) A Heterogeneous Solution for Improving the Return on Investment of Requirements Traceability. Requirements Engineering Conference, 12th IEEE International (RE'04). IEEE Computer Society
  8. Egyed, A., Biffl, S., Heindl, M. & Grünbacher, P. (2005) A value-based approach for understanding cost-benefit trade-offs during automated software traceability. 3rd international workshop on Traceability in emerging forms of software engineering Long Beach, California ACM Press.
  9. Fowler, M. (1999) Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, Menlo Park, California, Addison Wesley.
  10. Gamma, E., Helm, R., Johnson, R. & Vlissides, J. (1995) Design Patterns, Reading, MA, Addison-Wesley.
  11. Garzás, J. & Piattini, M. (2002) Analyzability and Changeability in Design Patterns. SugarLoafPLoP. The Second Latin American Conference on Pattern Languages of Programming. Itaipava, Río de Janeiro, Brasil.
  12. Garzás, J. & Piattini, M. (2005) An ontology for microarchitectural design knowledge. IEEE Software Magazine, 22, 28-33.
  13. Gotel, O. C. Z. & Finkelstein, A. C. W. (1994) An analysis of the requirements traceability problem. 1st International Conference on Requirements Engineering. Colorado Springs, CO, USA.
  14. Heindl, M. & Biffl, S. (2005) A Case Study on Valuebased Requirements Tracing. 10th European software engineering conference held jointly with 13th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering Lisbon, Portugal ACM Press.
  15. Huang, L. & Bohem, B. (2006) How Much Software Quality Investment Is Enough: A Value-Based Approach. IEEE Software, 23, 88- 95.
  16. Kazman, R., Asundi, J. & Klein, M. (2001) Quantifying the Costs and Benefits of Architectural Decisions. Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering. Toronto, Ontario, Canada, IEEE Computer Society.
  17. Nordberg, M. E. (2001) Aspect-Oriented Indirection - Beyond OO Design Patterns. OOPSLA 2001, Workshop Beyond Design: Patterns (mis)used. Tampa Bay, Florida, EEUU.
  18. Pigoski, T. M. (1996) Practical Software Maintenance. Best Practices for Managing your Investements, NY. USA, John Wiley & Sons.
  19. Srikanth, H. & Williams, L. (2005) On the economics of requirements-based test case prioritization. 7th international workshop on Economics-driven software engineering research St. Louis, Missouri ACM Press
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Cabrero D., Garzás J. and Piattini M. (2007). MAINTENANCE COST OF A SOFTWARE DESIGN - A Value-Based Approach . In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 1: ICEIS, ISBN 978-972-8865-88-7, pages 384-389. DOI: 10.5220/0002358903840389


in Bibtex Style

@conference{iceis07,
author={Daniel Cabrero and Javier Garzás and Mario Piattini},
title={MAINTENANCE COST OF A SOFTWARE DESIGN - A Value-Based Approach},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 1: ICEIS,},
year={2007},
pages={384-389},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0002358903840389},
isbn={978-972-8865-88-7},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 1: ICEIS,
TI - MAINTENANCE COST OF A SOFTWARE DESIGN - A Value-Based Approach
SN - 978-972-8865-88-7
AU - Cabrero D.
AU - Garzás J.
AU - Piattini M.
PY - 2007
SP - 384
EP - 389
DO - 10.5220/0002358903840389