Graduate Student, Department of Informatics
Thesis Title: Improving software maintainability evaluations by combining program analysis and expert judgment
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Bente Anda
Dag Sjøberg Tore Dybå |
About
Insofar, no unified theory is available regarding how to use design attributes of a software system (represented either by structural measures, structural symptoms or a combination of both) to evaluate accurately the maintainability of a system.
The diversity of contexts and situations makes it difficult to generalize findings from individual studies, and the inherent complexity of software maintenance (encompassing technological, human dynamics and cognition aspects) make the assessment of maintainability a difficult task.
Comprehension approaches such as opportunistic comprehension by Letovsky (1986) and opportunistic recognition of program plans (Soloway & Ehrlich, 1984) assume that a knowledge base is composed by the programmer expertise and their background knowledge. Work by O'Brian (2003) proposes that understanding large commercial software systems is driven by an information requirement. This suggests that one of the most important maintenance activities (program comprehension) is driven by the programmers experience and the information need (this last one we conjecture, is driven by the nature of maintenance tasks).
Therefore, our approach includes a more holistic approach to maintainability evaluations than that taken in most earlier studies and combine not only design attributes but incorporate also maintenance tasks and developers skills into the analysis. We conjecture that expert judgment might incorporate the analysis of contextual and cognitive factors into the maintainability evaluation, enabling more realistic and flexible models that can be used in combination with the already existing software design attributes analysis.
This PhD work builds upon this premise and intends to undertake several studies focusing on three main areas: (a) Establish a framework for combining software design attributes and expert judgment in maintainability evaluations (b) Determine the impact of different software design attributes on the ease/difficulty of different maintenance tasks and (c) Determine the adequacy/qualification of expert knowledge.
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