Abstract
Software maintenance activities have become more than ever a heavy burden for many firms (Corbi 1989, Yourdon 1992). Moreover, the increase in maintenance costs is mostly due to the deterioration of the program’s intrinsic quality. The key to reducing these maintenance costs is to apply software renovation tools and methodologies that will improve the quality of programs. This paper discusses the construction of a quality model that can highlight outlying software components that might cause potential quality problems, and that can recommend a set of actions to be undertaken in order to improve the software quality (e.g., the program has to be formatted, restructured, rewritten or documented). These actions significantly reduce the maintenance burden of computer programs and freeing up human resources for the development of new applications. The problem of evaluating the quality of programs is formulated as a multi-attribute-sorting problem and consists of assigning each program to an appropriate pre-defined category. This classification is obtained by applying three different approaches: multivariate statistical methods, multicriteria decision aid methodology and the rough set analysis.
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Meskens, N., Lebon, F. (2000). Multi-Attribute Evaluation of Software Maintainability. In: Laguna, M., Velarde, J.L.G. (eds) Computing Tools for Modeling, Optimization and Simulation. Operations Research/Computer Science Interfaces Series, vol 12. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4567-5_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4567-5_13
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