Software quality improvement and validation using reengineering

Abstract

In software development life cycle, software maintenance is among the critical phases. It is a post-implementation activity that requires rigorous human efforts. For any software developer, maintaining software for a longer period is the primary objective. This objective can be accomplished if good quality software is developed. Maintainability is one of the vital characteristics of software maintenance. Maintainability enables developers to keep the system alive for a longer period of time at a limited cost. Software Maintainability can be enhanced using reengineering. The proposed research validates improvement in the quality of the reengineered software system. The quality of the software is analyzed using a coupling, cohesion, inheritance, and other essential design metrics. The observed improvement in the software design is 62.1%. The execution time of the software is also reduced by 6.5%. Reduction in the cost of maintenance is also another important outcome of this research. The observed reduction in the maintenance cost is 36.8%. Thus, the main objective of the proposed research is to analyze and validate the quality improvement in the reengineered software. Agile Scrum methodology has been used to perform software reengineering. Design Metrics are measured using the Chidamber and Kemerer Java metric (CKJM) version-9.0 tool. For reengineering implementation, Net Beans 7.3 has been used.