Identifying Metrics For Measuring Maintainability Of Models Defined in SystemWeaver
Abstract
Software maintenance forms a crucial activity of any viable software system. Sometimes it becomes the most expensive and time-consuming phase in the life cycle of
the software product. Software maintainability on the other hand, measures how
easy it is for a software product to be modified. Since software products are growing
fast and are becoming more sophisticated over time, measuring the maintainability
during early stages of the development process, such as the phase of designing models, will be vital for reducing costs and improving quality of later stages. Our Study
focused on studying software models presented in SystemWeaver, one of the systems
that utilises models extensively for a wide range of industrial purposes. We analysed
the structures of the models collected and used their revision history to obtain more
knowledge and define situations reflecting some of the maintenance issues that the
developers faced during their development activities. Many of the defined situations
were confirmed later by interviewing experts in the collected data. The confirmed
situations, named patterns, were used to validate a set of maintainability metrics
which were extracted from literature and other research. The correlation tests for
validating the mentioned metrics showed promising results and proved that metrics
can be good candidates for measuring the maintainability of models. The results
of this study included (1) a prove that struggles during the development processes
can be recognised by inspecting some occurring patterns. (2) metrics can be used
to measure the maintainability of models such as the set of metrics we provided at
the final chapter of this report.
Degree
Student essay
Collections
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Date
2021-03-03Author
Awad, Abdullah
Saleh, Sinan
Keywords
Computer science
Software engineering
Case study
Models
Maintainability
Patterns
Metrics
Language
eng