Valued-based Decision Model for Renewal Processes in Software Maintenance

This work is based on a retrospective analysis of a renewal process applied to a very aged, highly degraded software system. Some aspects of the results are generalized to define a method for determining the technical and economic qualities of the components of a software system. The work also presents a decision model for identifying the most suitable renewal process to be applied, on the basis of the quality of the components and the aims of the renewal process. With the model presented, decision-making on the renewal process is specialized to each component of the software system, thus ensuring greater benefits from the process as a whole. The same model can be used to monitor the decay of a software system quality and thus avoid the need to renew it using the most costly renewal processes.