Towards a benchmark for the maintainability evolution of industrial software systems

Till Dohmen, Magiel Bruntink, Davide Ceolin, Joost Visser

Research output: Chapter in Book / Report / Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

Abstract

The maintainability of software is an important cost factor for organizations across all industries, as maintenance makes up approximately 40% to 70% of the total development costs of a software system. Organizations are often stuck in the situation where software maintenance costs dominate IT budgets, leaving no room for enhancement and innovation. Building a benchmark for maintainability evolution is helpful in this context because it can help organizations decide on software improvement or replacement strategies. The prototype benchmark we study in this paper shows that software volume and maintainability levels are strong determinants of future maintainability evolution rates. We further describe the data collection and cleaning procedures that were applied to approximately 1,750 industrial software systems, and we provide an exploratory analysis of the resulting benchmark dataset.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 26th International Workshop on Software Measurement, IWSM 2016 and the 11th International Conference on Software Process and Product Measurement, Mensura 2016
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
Pages11-21
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781509041473
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 6 Jan 2017
Event26th International Workshop on Software Measurement and the 11th International Conference on Software Process and Product Measurement, IWSM-Mensura 2016 - Berlin, Germany
Duration: 5 Oct 20167 Oct 2016

Conference

Conference26th International Workshop on Software Measurement and the 11th International Conference on Software Process and Product Measurement, IWSM-Mensura 2016
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityBerlin
Period5/10/167/10/16

Keywords

  • Benchmarking
  • Maintainability
  • Software evolution

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