Design patterns detection is a useful activity in reverse engineering to gain knowledge on the design issues of an existing system, on its software architecture and design quality, improving in this way the comprehension of the system and hence its maintainability and evolution. Several tools have been developed, but they usually provide different results analyzing the same systems. Some works ...

A full understanding of the characteristics of faults is crucial to several important research areas in testing and software maintenance. Applicable maintenance research areas include change impact analysis, maintainability, regression testing, and comparative evaluation of maintenance techniques. We explore the fundamental nature of faults by looking at the differences between a syntactic and ...

Maintenance of a computer-based system accounts for a large proportion of the total system cost. However, no well-established techniques exist for assessing the maintainability of such a system. This paper presents a case study in assessing the maintainability of a large, software intensive system. The techniques we used are described, and their strengths and weaknesses discussed.

Process modelling is a key activity of software process management and it is the starting point for enacting, evaluating and improving software processes. The current competitive marketplace calls for the continuous improvement of processes and therefore, it is fundamental to have software process models with a high maintainability. In this paper we introduce a set of metrics for software proce...

Dependency injection (DI) is generally known to improve maintainability by keeping application classes separate from the library. Particularly within Java environment, there are many applications using principles of DI with aim maintainability. There exists some work that provides an inference on impact maintainability, but no conclusive evidence provided. The fact publicly available tools for ...

A major strength of open-source software is that the source code is open to scrutiny by anyone who chooses to examine it. Accordingly, it is reasonable to assume that the quality of open-source software will be higher than that of closed-source software. After all, closed-source software is examined by only a limited number of individuals, all of whom are paid to do so. It seems equally reasona...