Hybrid-Based Maintainability Impact Analysis for Evolving Systems

Software maintenance becomes an integral part of software life cycle andconstitutes the most important fraction of the total cost of the softwarelifecycle. Around 50-80 percent of the total lifecycle cost is consumed bymaintenance for evolving system. Thus systems with poor maintainability aredifficult to modify and require more cost to maintain. This difficulty arises fromthe impact of the system components where the new requirements/goals willbe implemented. These new goals will result in modification of existingcomponents and creation of new components. In this paper, we present thefoundation for a new Hybrid-Based Maintainability Impact Analysis (HBMIA)methodology for assessing the impact of the new goals to be selected forimplementation on the system new and existing components. (HBMIA) usesnot only the system history but it also gets benefit from the expert’sexperience. (HBMIA) balances between the system historical data andexperts data based on the organization’ maturity and experts experience forsystem components. A case study is performed to demonstrate the addedvalue of the proposed (HBMIA).