A study of the effects of software development practices on software maintenance effort

Author

Slaughter, Sandra A. ; Banker, Rajiv D.

Author_Institution

Graduate Sch. of Ind. Adm., Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA, USA

fYear

1996

fDate

4-8 Nov 1996

Firstpage

197

Lastpage

205

Abstract

Many maintenance problems derive from inadequate software development practices. Poor design choices result in complex software that may be costly to support and difficult to change. A general framework based upon software complexity is proposed that could be used to assess the potential maintenance impact of development tools and techniques. To test the framework, a study was conducted in two commercial organizations. The results indicate that reduced maintenance effort is associated with development practices, including structured programming, report generators and packaged software. A surprising finding is that use of a software code generator is associated with increased maintenance effort

Keywords

application generators; human resource management; report generators; software development management; software maintenance; software packages; software quality; structured programming; commercial organizations; complex software; development tools; information systems management; packaged software; poor design choices; report generators; software code generator; software complexity; software development practices; software maintenance effort; software productivity; software quality; structured programming; support costs; Software maintenance;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Software Maintenance 1996, Proceedings., International Conference on

Conference_Location

Monterey, CA

ISSN

1063-6773

Print_ISBN

0-8186-7677-9

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICSM.1996.565007

Filename

565007