Estimation and prediction metrics for adaptive maintenance effortof object-oriented systems

摘要

Many software systems built in recent years have been developednusing object-oriented technology and, in some cases, they already neednadaptive maintenance in order to satisfy market and customer needs. Innmost cases, the estimation and prediction of maintenance effort isnperformed with difficulty due to the lack of metrics and suitablenmodels. In this paper, a model and metrics for estimation/prediction ofnadaptive maintenance effort are presented and compared with some othernsolutions taken from the literature. The model proposed can be used as angeneral approach for adopting well-known metrics (typically used for thenestimation of development effort) for the estimation/prediction ofnadaptive maintenance effort. The model and metrics proposed have beennvalidated against real data by using multilinear regression analysis.nThe validation has shown that several well-known metrics can benprofitably employed for the estimation/prediction of maintenance effort