Observe‐mine‐adopt (OMA): an agile way to enhance software maintainability

Abstract

We introduce the observe‐mine‐adopt (OMA) paradigm that assists organizations in making improvements to their software development processes without committing to and undertaking large‐scale sweeping organizational process improvement. Specifically, the approach has been applied to improve software practices focused on maintainability. This novel approach is based on the theory that software teams naturally make observations about things that do or do not work well. Teams then mine their artifacts and their recollections of events to find the software products, processes, metrics, etc. that led to the observation. In the case of software maintainability, it is then necessary to perform some measurement to ensure that the methods result in improved maintainability. We introduce two maintainability measures, maintainability product and perceived maintainability, to address this need. Other maintainability measures that may be used in the mine step are also examined. Finally, if the mining activities lead to validated discoveries of processes, techniques or practices that improve the software product, they are formalized and adopted by the team. OMA has been studied experimentally using two project studies and a Web‐based health care system which is maintained by a large industrial software organization. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Evaluation and Measurement of Software Process Improvement—A Systematic Literature Review

“…[8], [20], [23], [25], [26], [70], [90], [91], [93], [96], [100], [103], [104], [109]- [111], [113], [115], [117], [123], [129], [136], [137], [142], [145], [147], [151], [152], [154], [155], [158], [160], [162], [164], [171], [185], [188], [199], [200], [211], [214] 41 Defects This success indicator is to group metrics that are solely intended to measure the defects without relating them to quality.…”

“…Studies Frequency (abs/rel) Reliability [18], [67], [92], [129], [153], [166], [181], [212], [214] 9/0.47 Maintainability [117], [159], [160], [164], [182], [212] 6/0.32 Reusability [129], [148], [149], [159], [208] customer on how to circumvent problems or a shift in the user base can all cause a reduction in reported failures, making the measurement of software quality from this angle more complex [238].…”

The Sway of Agile Processes over Software Maintainability

“…The OSS approach advocates the source code to be freely available for amendments and its redistribution without any charge. The Object-Mine-Adopt is generally regarded as an agile process because it is more like people-oriented rather than processoriented and has many features like other agile methods [6]. It is swift, adaptive and self-organizing in nature and used to provide means to construct more maintainable software.…”

“…The OMA is an agile approach that helps organizations to identify and adopt software processes to enhance the maintainability and also emphasizes to ascertain highly maintainable modules, difficult to maintain modules and best practices to develop easy to maintain modules [6].…”