{"id":{"repo_id":"mit","oai_identifier":"oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/59221"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/mit/oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/59221","repository":{"repo_id":"mit","name":"MIT","base_url":"https://dspace.mit.edu/oai/request"},"display":{"title":"The impact of software design structure on product maintenance costs and measurement of economic benefits of product redesign","abstract":"This paper reports results of an empirical study that aimed to demonstrate the link between software product design structure and engineers' effort to perform a code modification in the context of a corrective maintenance task. First, this paper reviews the current state of the art in engineering economics of the maintenance phase of software lifecycle. Secondly, a measure of software product complexity suitable to assess maintainability of a software system is developed. This measure is used to analyze the design structure change that happened between two versions of a mature software product. The product selected for this study underwent a significant re-design between two studied versions. Thirdly, an experiment is designed to measure the effort engineers spend designing a code modification associated with a corrective change request. These effort measurements are used to demonstrate the effect of product design complexity on engineers' productivity. It is asserted in the paper that engineer's productivity improvements have a significant economic value and can be used to justify investments into re-design of an existing software product.","abstract_html":"This paper reports results of an empirical study that aimed to demonstrate the link between software product design structure and engineers' effort to perform a code modification in the context of a corrective maintenance task. 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