Thesis (M.App.Sc.) - Carleton University, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 105-110). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

The purpose of this project is to forecast the incidence of failures to be encountered by a software package for C3I systems over and throughout its life cycle. It will be assumed that a data base of software previously developed for C3I systems will be used to forecast the software integrity of a software package under initial development. "Software integrity" is defined as a projection of the stream of failures that will be experienced by the new software. The failure history of the mature C3I systems software will be statistically quantified parametrically and by experimental design techniques (ANOVA) to gather information which will be used to forecast what C3I software with similar characteristics--length, language, debugging effort, etc.--will experience. <p>Then, as the new C3I system software matures, statistical techniques for software systems engineering will be addressed for testing appropriateness of the initial projections; and eventually the new software will be parametrically modeled on its own merits to forecast the failures to be encountered over the remainder of its life cycle. <p>Lastly, the data base history of software for mature C3I systems software will be updated and amended as needed to facilitate reliable forecasting of software integrity for a new round of C3I systems software. <p>The attention to C3I implied by the title of the project will reflect itself in the classes of software considered and development conditions, schedules and complexities of the software. / Master of Science

Master of Science

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

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.

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.

Approved for public release, distribution unlimited / The maintenance of large military software systems is complex, involves users as well as software professionals, and requires appropriate management, which is one of the most important factors in efficient maintenance. Maintenance management requires information about the current state of the maintenance process that should be organized within a maintenance-oriented Enginering Database. This database should include all the necessary data about software changes, system configeration, maintenance task scheduling, etc., and it should be based on a realistic model of the maintenance process. This tesis proposes a mathematical Model of Software Maintenance that uses graphs to model the relationships between maintenance tasks and software components. The Model addresses the dynamic behavior of the maintenance process and supports priority and precedence of maintenance activities. The proposed Model of Software Maintenance provides a sound basis for implementation of a maintenance-oriented engineering database that supports automation of maintenance management, e.g., process control, task scheduling, job assignments, planning and forecast, gathering and interpretation of maintenance statistics and metrics, etc.

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.

Object-oriented systems that undergo repeated modifications commonly endure a loss of quality and design decay. This problem is often remedied by applying refactorings. Refactoring is one of the most important and commonly used techniques to improve the quality of the code by eliminating redundancy and reducing complexity; frequently refactored code is believed to be easier to understand, maintain and test. Object-oriented metrics provide an easy means to extract useful and measurable information about the structure of a software system. Metrics have been used to identify refactoring opportunities, detect refactorings that have previously been applied and gauge quality improvements after the application of refactorings. This thesis provides an in-depth analytical study of the relationship between metrics and refactorings. For this purpose we analyzed 136 versions of 4 different open source projects. We used RefactoringCrawler, an automatic refactoring detection tool to identify refactorings and then analyzed various metrics to study whether metrics can be used to (1) reliably identify refactoring opportunities, (2) detect refactorings that were previously applied, and (3) estimate the impact of refactoring on software quality. In conclusion, our study showed that metrics cannot be reliably used to either identify refactoring opportunities or detect refactorings. It is very difficult to use metrics to estimate the impact of refactoring, however studying the evolution of metrics at a system level indicates that refactoring does improve software quality and reduce complexity. / text