Assessing and Reducing the Impact of Software Design Defects
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The cost of software maintenance amounts to at least 50% of the overall cost of software development. This percentage is high because programs under maintenance generally have poor quality characteristics—especially low maintainability—resulting from the developers' high turnover rate, time pressure, lack of explicit design choices, and architectural drift. The goal of the proposed research is to evaluate the impact of design patterns and design defects on maintainability: to assess the use of design patterns by maintainers and to develop and apply a methodology to detect and to correct design defects. This assessment and methodology will deepen our understanding of software maintenance and allow the development of tools to improve the quality of programs and thus reduce the cost of maintenance.
