Evaluating software maintenance effort: The COME Matrix

Chua, B; Verner, J

Evaluating software maintenance effort: The COME Matrix

Chua, B Verner, J

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Publisher:: Springer-Verlag Berlin / Heidelberg
Publication Type:: Conference Proceeding
Citation:: Software Engineering , Business Continuity and Education, 2011, pp. 120 - 136
Issue Date:: 2011-01

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Field	Value	Language
dc.contributor.author	Chua, B	en_US
dc.contributor.author	Verner, J	en_US
dc.contributor.editor	Kim, PTH	en_US
dc.contributor.editor	Adeli, PH	en_US
dc.contributor.editor	Kim, HK	en_US
dc.contributor.editor	Kang, HJ	en_US
dc.contributor.editor	Kim, KJ	en_US
dc.contributor.editor	Kiumi, A	en_US
dc.contributor.editor	Kang, BH	en_US
dc.date	2011-12-08	en_US
dc.date.issued	2011-01	en_US
dc.identifier.citation	Software Engineering , Business Continuity and Education, 2011, pp. 120 - 136	en_US
dc.identifier.issn	1865-0929	en_US
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10453/31274
dc.description.abstract	If effort estimates are not easily assessed upfront by software maintainers we may have serious problems with large maintenance projects, or when we make repeated maintenance changes to software. This is particularly problematic when inaccurate estimates of the required resources leads to serious negotiation issues. The development of a Categorisation of Maintenance Effort (COME) matrix enables an overall summary of software maintenance changes and maintenance effort to be shown, upfront, to software practitioners. This can occur without any consideration or use of other effort estimation techniques whose results, when used to estimate effort, can appear complicated and it may not be clear how accurate their estimates may be. We use a simple approach to categorizing maintenance effort data using five steps. We use regression analysis with Jorgensen's 81 datasets to evaluate the selected variables to find out the true efficacy of our approach: 1) adaptive changes and functional changes with maintenance effort predicted from low to high, 2) high predicted effort when updating KSLOC for software maintenance changes, 3) find that more lines of source codes do not imply that more software maintenance effort is needed, 4) find no significant relationship when we consider the age of the application and 5) find that at least 20 application sizes between KSLOC of 100, 200, 400 and 500 have a low predicted software maintenance effort. Our experiment shows that using the COME matrix is an alternative approach to other cost estimation techniques for estimating effort for repeated requirement changes in large software maintenance projects.	en_US
dc.publisher	Springer-Verlag Berlin / Heidelberg	en_US
dc.relation.ispartof	Software Engineering , Business Continuity and Education	en_US
dc.relation.ispartof	International Conference on Advanced Software Engineering and Its Applications (ASEA)	en_US
dc.title	Evaluating software maintenance effort: The COME Matrix	en_US
dc.type	Conference Proceeding
utslib.location	Berlin/Heidelberg	en_US
utslib.location.activity	Jeju Island, Korea	en_US
utslib.for	0803 Computer Software	en_US
dc.location.activity	Korea
pubs.embargo.period	Not known	en_US
pubs.organisational-group	/University of Technology Sydney
pubs.organisational-group	/University of Technology Sydney/Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology
pubs.organisational-group	/University of Technology Sydney/Strength - HCTD - Human Centred Technology Design
pubs.organisational-group	/University of Technology Sydney/Students
utslib.copyright.status	closed_access
pubs.consider-herdc	true	en_US
pubs.finish-date	2011-12-10	en_US
pubs.place-of-publication	Berlin/Heidelberg	en_US
pubs.start-date	2011-12-08	en_US

Abstract:

If effort estimates are not easily assessed upfront by software maintainers we may have serious problems with large maintenance projects, or when we make repeated maintenance changes to software. This is particularly problematic when inaccurate estimates of the required resources leads to serious negotiation issues. The development of a Categorisation of Maintenance Effort (COME) matrix enables an overall summary of software maintenance changes and maintenance effort to be shown, upfront, to software practitioners. This can occur without any consideration or use of other effort estimation techniques whose results, when used to estimate effort, can appear complicated and it may not be clear how accurate their estimates may be. We use a simple approach to categorizing maintenance effort data using five steps. We use regression analysis with Jorgensen's 81 datasets to evaluate the selected variables to find out the true efficacy of our approach: 1) adaptive changes and functional changes with maintenance effort predicted from low to high, 2) high predicted effort when updating KSLOC for software maintenance changes, 3) find that more lines of source codes do not imply that more software maintenance effort is needed, 4) find no significant relationship when we consider the age of the application and 5) find that at least 20 application sizes between KSLOC of 100, 200, 400 and 500 have a low predicted software maintenance effort. Our experiment shows that using the COME matrix is an alternative approach to other cost estimation techniques for estimating effort for repeated requirement changes in large software maintenance projects.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10453/31274