Abstract
Software is in constant evolution and many approaches have been suggested to study software maintenance productivity. This research reports on a process to design and implement a productivity model of legacy software based on the measurement of small functional enhancements using the COSMIC ISO 19761 international standard. Two motivations influence this research: 1) understanding the productivity of the software maintenance process to help manage the cost of maintenance; 2) understanding the cost drivers that affect the software maintenance productivity. This research reports on an empirical study of a productivity measurement program implemented in a large banking legacy system.
Highlights
This research reports on a process to design and implement a productivity model of legacy software based on the measurement of small functional enhancements using the COSMIC ISO 19761 international standard
This paper presents an empirical study of 88 small functional enhancements to a software system from the core banking ERP legacy system of a large retail bank to figure out the productivity of a maintenance process
After the maintenance requests are ordered according to efforts, the number of functional points per hour is used to calculate the productivity ratio while the unit cost is determined by dividing effort required to develop small enhancements to functional size of each small enhancement
Summary
The software lifecycle can be divided into two distinct parts, as presented in ISO 12207 [1]: the initial development of the software and its use and ongoing maintenance. The international standard ISO 14764 [2] on software maintenance defines four categories to classify the nature of individual maintenance work requests: adaptive, corrective, preventive, and perfective (see Table 1). Reactive modification of a software product performed after delivery to correct the faults discovered. These modifications often repair code to satisfy functional requirements. Already in 1996 Basili et al were reporting that there were not enough empirical studies and available research data for software maintenance [4] while Koskinen [5] was reporting that “Software maintenance and evolution is a considerably understudied area while taking into account its cost effect”. The projection for the following years is showing that the number of personnel in maintenance would increase considerably over.
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