How design principles affect maintenance effort

• Main Authors: Feng-Pu Yang, 楊豐溥
• Other Authors: Hewijin Christine Jiau
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2004
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/62120406349178520173

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 電機工程學系碩博士班 === 92 === 　　The uncertainty caused by human factors lets the software quality become difficult to control, especially for inexperienced developers. There is a need to find something which could regularize developers to deliver good software. Design principles which are the insight of experienced developers, can be used to regularize the development of inexperienced developers. This thesis designs an experiment to test the capability of design principle in reducing maintenance effort (maintainability is an indicator of software quality). Our focus is to test the effect of design principles on perfective maintenance effort. The experiment composes of two processes, software development process and perfective maintenance process, and this thesis work applies design principles in development process and collect maintenance effort later. The dependent variables are design principles (which guide to determinate class hierarchy and complexity of collaborations); the independent variables are maintenance effort, including understanding effort and modifying effort. A series of hypotheses are tested and the results show those two independent variables (factors) have significant effect on maintenance effort. Another finding is that the complexity of collaborations does not affect the modifying effort strongly. An analysis technology is also introduced, it is useful in testing hypothesis from different viewpoints. Our contribution is to provide an analysis of relationship between applying design principles and the effort of perfective maintenance.