Growing maintenance costs have become a major concern for developers and users of soft-9 ware systems. Changeability is an important aspect of maintainability, especially in environments where software changes are frequently required. In this work, the assumption that high-level de-11 sign has an in uence on maintainability is carried over to changeability and investigated for that quality characteristics. The approach taken to assess the changeability of an object-oriented 13 (OO) system is to compute the impact of changes made to classes of the system. A change impact model is deÿned at the conceptual level and mapped on the C++ language. In order 15 to experiment the model as a changeability indicator on large industrial software systems, an experiment involving the impact of one change is carried out on a telecommunications system. 17The results suggest that the software can easily absorb that kind of change and that well chosen conventional OO design metrics can be used as indicators of changeability.

Abstract

Growing maintenance costs have become a major concern for developers and users of soft-9 ware systems. Changeability is an important aspect of maintainability, especially in environments where software changes are frequently required. In this work, the assumption that high-level de-11 sign has an in uence on maintainability is carried over to changeability and investigated for that quality characteristics. The approach taken to assess the changeability of an object-oriented 13 (OO) system is to compute the impact of changes made to classes of the system. A change impact model is deÿned at the conceptual level and mapped on the C++ language. In order 15 to experiment the model as a changeability indicator on large industrial software systems, an experiment involving the impact of one change is carried out on a telecommunications system. 17The results suggest that the software can easily absorb that kind of change and that well chosen conventional OO design metrics can be used as indicators of changeability. c 2002 Published 19 by Elsevier Science B.V.

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