Hybrid-based maintainability impact analysis for evolving systems

Abstract

Software maintenance becomes an integral part of software life cycle and constitutes the most important fraction of the total cost of the software lifecycle. Around 5080 percent of the total lifecycle cost is consumed by maintenance for evolving system [35]. Thus systems with poor maintainability are difficult to modify and require more cost to maintain. This difficulty arises from the impact on the system components where the new requirements/goals will be implemented [9]. These new goals will result in modification of existing components and creation of new components. In this paper, we present the foundations for a new Hybrid-Based Maintainability Impact Analysis (HBMIA) methodology for assessing the impact of the new goals to be selected for implementation on new and existing system components. HBMIA uses not only the system history but it also gets benefit from the experts' experience. HBMIA balances between the system historical data and experts' data based on the system maturity and expert's experience for system components. A case study is performed to demonstrate the added value of the proposed HBMIA. © 2009 World Scientific Publishing Company.