Abstract
Software maintenance is a time taking activity in the real world. Execution time of software maintenance process may get increased due to interdepartmental communication, thus, increasing the cost and decreasing the performance of the process. We suggested performance evaluation of software maintenance process through the transformation of activity diagram into generalised stochastic Petri nets (GSPN). For this study, execution time and cost of maintenance process are defined as performance measures, and the role-based approach is used to understand the flow of software maintenance activities in a software organisation. Activity diagram is constructed to be transformed into GSPN. We used PIPE2 to analyse the GSPN. PIPE2 calculates average number of tokens on a place in the GSPN, throughput of timed transition and state space analysis. State space involves calculation of the reachability of the GSPN net that shows whether a GSPN holds the property of safeness, boundness and is deadlock free.
 
 Keywords: Generalised stochastic Petri nets (GSPN), GSPN analysis, performance evaluation, performance modelling, software maintenance process, stochastic Petri nets.
Highlights
Software maintenance is a critical process which can lead towards success or prodigious business loss
We suggested performance evalua tion of softwa re maintenance process through the trans forma tion of a cti vi ty diagra m into generalised s tochasti c Petri nets (GSPN)
Software maintenance process was mapped into GSPN and performance evaluation was simulated in an automated tool PIPE2
Summary
Software maintenance is a critical process which can lead towards success or prodigious business loss. Performance measures that are used by most of the performance evaluation models are complete cycle time (Kumar, 2012) of a particular activity in a process, workload (Bjorling & Hoff, 2002) on individual resource or at team level in a process, throughput of a process (Artikson, 1997) and communication paths (Warmer & Kleppe, 2003). Though all these models have their own significance, a common limitation observed is that they require software maintenance process to be executed first.
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