Inheritance Based Maintenance Prediction Scheme Using Design Complexity Metrics

The Object-Oriented paradigm has become increasingly popular in recent years. Researchers agree that, although maintenance may turn out to be easier for Object-Oriented systems, it is unlikely that the maintenance burden will completely disappear. One approach to controlling software maintenance costs is the utilization of software metrics during the development phase, to help identify potential problem areas. Many new metrics have been proposed for Object-Oriented systems.

The purpose of this work is to apply three existing Object-Oriented design complexity metrics and, specifically, to assess their ability to predict maintenance time for the inheritance process. This research reports the results of validating three metrics, Interaction Level (IL), Interface Size (IS), and Operation Argument Complexity (OAC).

This system is designed to estimate maintenance time for the software's that are developed by using java. A controlled experiment was conducted to investigate the effect of design complexity (as measured by the above metrics) on maintenance time. Each of the three metrics by itself was found to be useful in the experiment in predicting maintenance performance.