A Reasonable Software Maintenance Effort Estimation Technique

Abstract

Software development efforts result in the delivery of a software product that satisfies userrequirements. Accordingly, the software product must change or evolve. Once in operation,defects are uncovered, operating environments change, and new user requirements surface. Themaintenance phase of the life cycle begins following a warranty period or post-implementationsupport delivery, but maintenance activities occur much earlier.Any activity after the delivery of the system or software is considered as maintenance, if so wehave to know how much effort is needed to make the change. But at first it is known that theeffort to be assigned has a direct relation with the size of the software to be maintained. So it ismuch better if we measure the size of the system or software to be maintained before proceeds tothe assignment of the effort. In this study we have given a detail attention to the sizemeasurement of the system or software to be maintained for the accuracy of the effort estimationis only as good as the accuracy of the size measurement of software to be maintained. We haveused LOC approach which is adopted from the basic COCOMO developed by Barry Boehm andFP approaches which is again adopted from IFPUG organization. The Line of code isunderstandable at the developer side but more difficult to communicate with the client who hasno understanding of the complexity behind the software because the client judge the softwarebased on the functionality of that software itself.In order to make measured size used as same unit we have used IFPUG conversion table toconvert the size measured in LOC to UFP. After the conversion of the LOC to FP the newconcept of VAF is applied to adjust the unadjusted FP.According to the Basic COCOMO the effort is measured in terms of size of the software to bemaintained since the effort required to maintain the type of the requested maintenance type ishighly depend up on the size of the system to be maintained. As the size of the maintenancesystem increased the effort also increased in the same rate. Then we conclude our model as theeffort required to fix the requested type of maintenance have an exponential factor to account forthe relative economies or diseconomies of scale encountered as a software project increases itssize.