Project report (M.S.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1990. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 104). Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (M. App. Sc.)--Carleton University, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 83-84). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (M.App.Sc.) - Carleton University, / Includes bibliographical references (p. 53-56). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

This paper describes the measurement-based software maintenance process defined and implemented at Lockheed-Martin, Moorestown, NJ. The documented process includes extensive data collection, a tightly controlled but highly accessible database, data analysis techniques supported by software tools, and process assessment and improvement activities. The methods and techniques used are presented in a 'how to' fashion so that other organizations can leverage our efforts to define and implement a measurement-based process of their own. Our approach is an evolutionary one, rather than a revolutionary organizational upheaval. We describe the benefits gained from our process, including statistically validated metric results, and the subsequent process improvements implemented. This paper describes solutions to the 'real-world' issues faced by an organization which successfully implemented a measurement-based software maintenance process.

This dissertation describes a methodology for assessing the software process (both development and maintenance) used by an organization. The assessment methodology integrates the principles of Total Quality Management and the work of the Software Engineering Institute. The integrated assessment methodology results in a well understood, well-documented, quantitatively evaluated software process. The methodology utilizes four steps: investigation, modeling, data collection, and analysis of both process content and process output. The integrated assessment methodology was implemented at a large commercial software organization over a two year period. Implementation results are presented and significant conclusions are discussed. Four areas for further research are also presented. / Ph. D.

Maintainability must be integrated into software as early in the development life cycle as possible to avoid overwhelming maintenance costs at later stages. This research describes a methodology which assists in the development of maintainable systems and does so without disrupting industry standard development techniques. The process uses software metrics and iterative enhancement concepts to reduce the complexity of high-level language code, making it less error-prone and more maintainable. The experiment uses large-scale system software from a major software producer. / Master of Science

Att sätta sig in i system kan vara krångligt utan rätt sorts dokumentation. Vi har undersökt vilken dokumentation som kan vara lämplig att lämna över till nya utvecklare, som ska arbeta vidare med systemet i software maintenance fasen. Det har gjorts genom att vi har gjort en litteraturstudie om dokumentation samt undersökt vad för dokumentationsartefakter som används när man ska sätta sig in i datorsystem. Vi använde eXtreme Programming för att utveckla ett system som vi försökte dokumentera samtidigt som vi utvecklade det. eXtreme Programming förordar muntlig kommunikation, vilket är svårt att lämna över till nya utvecklare. Vi upptäckte under vår utveckling att det var svårt att föra in dokumentation sam-tidigt som utvecklandet pågick,  därför använde vi bara enhetstester och  strukturerade kod-kommentarer under utvecklingsiterationerna. Vi undersökte hur dokumentationen som skapats fungerade genom att göra en undersökning bestående av strukturerade intervjuer där de fick komma med kommentarer om hur dokumen-tationen hjälpte förståelsen för systemet. Vi lämnar ifrån oss en vidareutveckling  av eXtreme Programming  som innefattar en doku-mentationsiteration  innan överlämnandet  samt en studie om vad för dokumentation som är värdefull att ha vid systemöverlämningar. / Understanding systems can be a tough task without the right sort of documentation. We have examined the documentation artifacts which may be appropriate to hand over to new develop-ers, who will continue working with the system during the software maintenance phase. By doing a literature review on documentation and examined what documentation artifacts is used when you want to  understand a computer system. We used the eXtreme Programming system development methodology to develop a system that we tried to document as we devel-oped it. eXtreme Programming favors oral communication, but that is hard to hand over to new devel-opers. We discovered during our development that it was difficult to introduce documentation while the development process was going on so we only used structured code comments and unit testing during the development iterations We examined how the documentation that was created worked by doing a survey consisting of structured interviews where the respondents made comments about if and how the documen-tation improved their understanding of the system. We pass on an evolved eXtreme Programming system development methodology, which in-cludes a standalone documentation iteration before the handover, and a study of what kind of documentation that is valuable to have when transferring systems to new developers.

Software Maintenance is becoming more and more challenging due to rapidly changing customer needs, technologies and need for highly skilled labor. Many problems that existed a decade ago continue to exist or have even grown. In this context organizations find it difficult to match engineer interest, skill to particular customer problem. Thus making it difficult for organization to keep the selfish and rational engineers motivated and productive. In this thesis we have used game theory and mechanism design to model the interactions among such selfish engineers to motivate truth revelation using incentive based allocation schemes for software maintenance problems, especially Ticket Allocation Problem. Ticket allocation or problem allocation is a key problem in the software maintenance process.Tickets are usually allocated by the manager or the technical lead. In allocating a ticket, the manager or technical lead is normally guided by the complexity assessment of the ticket as provided by the maintenance engineers, who are entrusted with the responsibility of fixing the problem.The rationality of the maintenance engineers could induce them to report the complexity in an untruthfulway so as to increase their payoffs.This leads to non-optimal ticket allocation. In this thesis we first address the problem of eliciting ticket complexities in a truthfulway from each individual maintenance engineer, using a mechanism design approach. In particular, we model the problem as that of designing an incentive compatible mechanism and we offer two possible solutions.The first one, TA-DSIC, a Dominant Strategy Incentive Compatible (DSIC) solution and the second solution, TA-BIC, is a Bayesian Incentive Compatible mechanism. We show that the proposed mechanisms outperform conventional allocation protocols in the context of a representative software maintenance organization. In this thesis,we next address the incentive compatibility issue for group ticket allocation problem .Many times a ticket is also allocated to more than one engineers. This may be due to a quick customer delivery(time)deadline. The decision of such allocation is generally taken by the lead, based on customer deadlines and a guided complexity assessment from each maintenance engineer.The decision of allocation in such case should ensure that every individual reveals truth in the proposed group(or coalition) and has incentive to participate in the game as individual and in the coalition. We formulate this problem as Normal form game and propose three mechanisms, (1)Division of Labor, (2)Extended Second Price and (3)Greedy Division of Labor. We show that the proposed mechanisms are DSIC and we discuss their rationality properties.

The purpose of this thesis is to estimate the potential performance improvement in sustaining engineering (SE) when an Open Architecture (OA) approach to system development is used. Its basis is that in Integrated Warfare Systems (IWS) acquisition, 80% of total lifecycle costs occur during the Operation and Support phase. This statistic demonstrates the necessity of measuring how the OA approach will affect software upgrades and maintenance processes for the AEGIS IWS lifecycle. Using the OA approach, advances in distance support and monitoring and maintenance-free operating periods are possible; these advances are significant in supporting the need to reduce costs and manpower while improving performance. To estimate the potential (Return on Investment) ROI that an OA approach might enable SE in the form of software maintenance and upgrades, this thesis will apply the Knowledge Value Added (KVA) methodology to establish the baseline, "As Is," configuration of the current solutions in AEGIS. The KVA analysis will yield the ROI's and the current models for the approach to software maintenance and upgrades. Based on the assumptions of OA design for original system development, new approaches to distance and maintenance and monitoring will be explored in "To Be" solutions, and the ROIs will be estimated. The "To Be" solutions are rooted in the assumptions of MFOP and ARCI, and the results indicate that these solutions yield a potential improvement of 720% and a cost savings of $3 65,104.63 over the current methodology for just one ship. For all ships using AEGIS, ROI improves by 71,967%--with a cost savings of $2 6,543,824.56. The conclusion is that OA enables extension of these best practice approaches to AEGIS maintenance and upgrade solutions.

The studies reported herein compare comprehension of Ut style literate programs to that of traditional modular programs documented by embedded comments. Novice and intermediate programmers participated in three experiments designed to determine the comprehensibility of literate programs written using a language-independent system for abstraction-oriented literate programming compared with programs written using traditional modular programming techniques (traditional modular programs). Programs were written in either the C or FORTRAN programming language. Half of the subjects in each group received a literate program, while the other half received a traditional modular program with embedded documentation. Subjects received a problem specification, input and output specifications, and a language reference for use in the study. Subjects were asked to perform a program maintenance task (complete an incomplete program). The maintenance task was used as a measure of comprehension; it simulates an actual task in the software engineering industry that requires program comprehension in order to be completed. The elapsed time to effect a solution was recorded. The completed programs were judged as correct, functionally correct with syntax errors, or incorrect; several reconstructive program comprehension measures were also collected and analyzed_ The clear overall result was that subjects using the literate programs found a solution (correct or functionally correct with syntax errors) more often than did subjects using the traditional modular programs with embedded comments. In fact, none of the subjects in this study who modified the traditional programs were able to effect a solution that was totally correct, nor even one that was functionally correct with syntax errors.