Background: Despite the number of empirical studies that assess Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) techniques, more research is required to investigate, for example, how software maintainability is impacted when these techniques are employed. One way to minimize the effort and increase the reliability of results in further research is to systematize empirical studies in Aspect-Oriented...

Context: Application of a refactoring operation creates a new set of dependency in the revised design as well as a new set of further refactoring candidates. In the studies of stepwise refactoring recommendation approaches, applying one refactoring at a time has been used, but is inefficient because the identification of the best candidate in each iteration of refactoring identification process...

In their lifetime software systems usually need to be adapted in order to fit in a changing environment or to cover new required functionality. The effort necessary for implementing changes is related to the maintainability of the software system. Therefore, maintainability is an important quality aspect of software systems. Today Software Architecture plays an important role in achieving softw...

Using model-to-model transformations to generate analysis models or code from architecture models is sought to promote compliance and reuse of components. The maintainability of transformations is influenced by various characteristics as with every programming language artifact. Code metrics are often used to estimate code maintainability. However, most of the established metrics do not apply t...

Model Driven Software Development (MDSD) has matured over the last few years and is now becoming an established technology. One advantage that is promoted by the MDSD community is the improved maintainability during the systems evolution over conventional development approaches. Compared to code-based development (meta-)models and transformations need to be handled differently when it comes to ...

The accurate maintainability prediction of relational database-driven software applications can improve the management of projects relating to these applications, thus benefitting software organisations. This paper gives an up-to-date account of the state of practice in maintainability prediction for relational database-driven software applications and provides a baseline for conducting further...

Architecture-based metrics can provide valuable information on whether or not one can localize the effects of modification (such as adjusting data flows or control flows) in software and can therefore be used to prevent the changes from adversely affecting other software components. This paper proposes an architecture-centric metric using entropy for assessing structural dependencies among soft...

Model-driven Engineering (MDE) approaches often present themselves as a solution to palliate the complexity of software maintainability tasks. However, there is no empirical evidence of their benefits and limitations with respect to code-based maintainability practices. To fill this gap, this paper illustrates the results of an empirical study, involving 44 subjects, in which we compared an MDE...