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An Empirical Study of Relationship between Object-oriented Metrics and Maintainability

객체지향 메트릭과 유지보수성과의 관계에 대한 실험적 연구

  • Published : 2006.04.01

Abstract

Software maintenance is an important and very expensive activity in software life cycle. To estimate the maintainability cost of software, many software metrics have been proposed. This paper presents the result of an experimental study to explore the relationship between maintainability and some software metrics. LCOM, RFC, DAC, and LOC are employed as metrics and time really spent for maintenance activity has been collected. In the experimental study, we have found that for some systems, the existing metrics may not be an indicator to maintenance effort, which is not consistent with our general knowledge on the relationship between them. Specifically speaking, we recognized that there should be more empirical study on the relationship between metrics and maintainability of softwares which have been developed using recent technologies such as software architecture and design pattern.

유지보수는 소프트웨어 생명 주기에서 대부분의 비용이 소요되는 중요한 활동이다. 기존에 소프트웨어 유지보수 활동에 소요되는 비용의 예측을 위하여 다양한 소프트웨어 메트릭이 제안되었다. 본 논문에서는 객체지향 소프트웨어의 유지보수성과 기존에 제안된 메트릭과의 관계를 파악하기 위해서 수행된 실험의 결과를 소개한다. 실험에서는 메트릭으로서 LCOM, RFC, DAC, LOC를 사용하였으며 클라이언트/서버 및 웹 기반 시스템을 대상으로 유지보수 활동 시 실제로 소요되는 시간을 측정하였다. 본 실험을 통해서 메트릭과 유지보수 비용과의 관계에 대한 기존의 일반적인 주장을 실제 시스템의 유지보수 활동을 통해서 확인한 결과 기존의 주장과 달리 일부 시스템의 경우에는 기존의 주장을 뒷받침하지 못할 수 있음을 확인하였다. 구체적으로 말하면 소프트웨어 아키텍처, 설계 패턴 등이 적용되는 개발된 최근의 소프트웨어에서는 메트릭과 유지보수 활동과의 관계에 대한 추가적인 많은 연구가 필요함을 확인하였다.

Keywords

References

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