Title :
A Proposal and Empirical Validation of Metrics to Evaluate the Maintainability of Software Process Models
Author :
Garcia, Felix ; Ruiz, Francisco ; Visaggio, Corrado Aaron
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Inf. Syst. & Technol., Castilla-La Mancha Univ., Real
Abstract :
Software measurement is essential for understanding, defining, managing and controlling the software development and maintenance processes and it is not possible to characterize the various aspects of development in a quantitative way without having a deep understanding of software development activities and their relationships The current competitive marketplace calls for the continuous improvement of processes and as consequence companies have to change their processes in order to adapt to these new emerging needs. It implies the continuous change of their software process models and therefore, it is fundamental to facilitate the evolution of these models by evaluating its easiness of maintenance (maintainability). In this paper we introduce a set of metrics for software process models and discuss how these can be used as maintainability indicators. In particular, we report the results of a family of experiments that assess relationships between the structural properties, as measured by the metrics, of the process models and their maintainability. As a result a set of useful metrics to evaluate the software process models maintainability, have been obtained
Keywords :
software development management; software maintenance; software metrics; software development; software maintenance; software metrics; software process models; Application software; Capability maturity model; Instrumentation and measurement; Open source software; Programming; Proposals; Scanning probe microscopy; Software maintenance; Software measurement; Software quality; Maintainability; Metrics; Software Process Models;
Conference_Titel :
Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference, 2006. IMTC 2006. Proceedings of the IEEE
Conference_Location :
Sorrento
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-9359-7
Electronic_ISBN :
1091-5281
DOI :
10.1109/IMTC.2006.328377