Evergreen Software Preservation: The Anti-Ageing Model

Abstract

Ageing is an unpreventable manifestation in all living creators on earth. In human being, the process of delaying the ageing progression is known as an anti-ageing process. We try to study the similar approach and phenomenon of ageing and anti-ageing in software environment and behaviour. The symptom of degradation in term of quality is observed as the indicator of ageing phenomenon in software system. Like human ageing, software ageing can be delayed by identifying factors that stimulus the ageing process. Ageing in software specifically for application software occurs when the software is degraded in term of its quality, user's satisfaction and dynamic. Previous studies indicated that software ageing factors possibly could be classified into some categorization such as functional, human, product and environment. With these factors, an anti-ageing model is developed which may help in preventing software from aged prematurely. This paper presents the empirical study conducted in Malaysia involving software practitioners on issues in software ageing and related. Furthermore, we propose a software anti-ageing model and a guideline on the ageing prevention. The proposed model is applied and validated through a case study.