Experience on the control of software maintenance in SIP

Abstract

The telecom company SIP promoted a program specifically designed for the management of the product maintainability level of its software. SIP started from a study of the intrinsic maintainability of a software product, defined as a property of the product representing the facility of performing maintenance actions (evolutionary, corrective, adaptive and perfective) on the code, irrespective of external elements such as a documentation, standards, etc. By measuring with appropriate metrics the complexity of the product-seen as the difficulty of interacting with the listing and which is inversely related with the maintainability-it is possible to obtain indexes representative of its actual state of maintainability. The authors deal with the control flow of COBOL programs. Within the scope of these types of measurements, the two different possible approaches-structural and dimensional-are examined.<>