Software Maintenance Prediction Using Weighted Scenarios: An Architecture Perspective

Software maintenance is considered one of the most important issues in software engineering which has some serious implications in term of cost and effort. It consumes enormous amount of organization's overall resources. On the other hand, software architecture of an application has considerable effect on quality factors such as maintainability, performance, reliability and flexibility etc. Using software architecture for quantification of certain quality factor will help organizations to plan resources accordingly. This paper is an attempt to predict software maintenance effort at architecture level. The method takes requirements, domain knowledge and general software engineering knowledge as input in order to prescribe application architecture. Once application architecture is prescribed, then weighted scenarios and certain factors (i.e. system novelty, turnover and maintenance staff ability, documentation quality, testing quality etc) that affect software maintenance are applied to application architecture to quantify maintenance effort. The technique is illustrated and evaluated using web content extraction application architecture.