A study on the effect of architecture on maintainability of object-oriented systems

Hsia, Pei; Gupta, Aman; Kung, Chenho; Peng, Jenpang; Liu, S.

doi:10.1109/icsm.1995.526522

“…Some studies on the relationship between design and maintainability were based on 7 other design metrics. Hsia et al, for example, studied the e ect of architecture on maintainability [13]. On two systems designed by students, they measured maintain-9 ability (adding new features) and its relationship to architecture, namely the broadness of the inheritance trees.…”

Section: Related Work 23mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It turned out that maintainability is better for systems with 11 broader trees, i.e., shallower inheritance trees. Briand et al deÿned 18 coupling measures between classes and studied their signiÿcance in predicting fault-proneness in 13 several industrial systems on which they had gathered maintenance data [6]. They were able to conclude that some of the coupling metrics were signiÿcant predictors of 15 fault-proneness.…”

Section: Related Work 23mentioning

confidence: 99%

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A change impact model for changeability assessment in object-oriented software systems

Chaumun¹,

Kabaili

²

,

Keller

³

et al. 2002

Science of Computer Programming

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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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“…Those studies that have been made and reported on in the software maintenance literature do not tend to substantiate those claims. [2] On the contrary, they make those claims dependent on a number of constraints which severely limit the exploitation of object-oriented techniques like inheritance and polymorphism. The quintessence of those studies are that object-oriented systems can be easier to maintain if -inheritance is limited, -polymorphie is avoided, -classes are restricted to a few methods, and -class hierarchies are kept shallow.…”

Section: Program Comprehension and Object Orientationmentioning

confidence: 98%

Comprehending a complex, distributed, object-oriented software system: a report from the field

Sneed¹,

Dombovari²

Proceedings Seventh International Workshop on Program Comprehension

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Comprehending complex, distributed, object-oriented software systems is a difficult task which must be approached in a formal disciplined manner if it is to be solved at all. The authors of this paper have developed a formal tool supported approach using relational databases to model both the requirement specification and the system implementation of a very large commercial application system. The approach combines forward and reverse engineering techniques to link the implementation to the specification, thereby providing a basis for traceability between system artifacts and requirements. The result is a partial comprehension adequate for system maintenance.

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“…9 For example, when there is a change in the return type of a pure virtual method, the rows in which G or I appear cannot be investigated since neither the abstract class 11 can be instantiated as an object (G) nor the pure virtual method can be invoked (I). For each row, the appropriate Boolean expression is derived and reduced, if possible, 13 and the term "L" is appended if there is local impact. For example, for a deletion of a non-abstract class in the class inheritance structure (code change from "class c2: c1, 15 c0 {: : : }" to "class c2: c0 {: : : }"), the corresponding expression is H + F+L which implies there is impact in derived classes (H), in friend classes (F) and locally (L) 17 too.…”

Section: Impactmentioning

confidence: 99%

A change impact model for changeability assessment in object-oriented software systems

Chaumun¹,

Kabaili²,

Keller³

et al.

Proceedings of the Third European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering (Cat. No. PR00090)

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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.

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A study on the effect of architecture on maintainability of object-oriented systems

Cited by 11 publications

References 10 publications

A change impact model for changeability assessment in object-oriented software systems

A change impact model for changeability assessment in object-oriented software systems

Comprehending a complex, distributed, object-oriented software system: a report from the field

A change impact model for changeability assessment in object-oriented software systems

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