An Experiment of Evaluating Software Understandability (original) (raw)

Abstract

Software understandability is one of important characteristics of software quality because it can influence cost or reliability at software evolution in reuse or maintenance. But it is difficult to evaluate software understandability because understanding is an internal process of humans. So, we propose "software overhaul" as a method for externalizing process of understanding software systems and propose a probability model for evaluating software understandability based on it. This paper presented the experiment of evaluating software understandability using a probabilistic model.

Loading...

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

References (11)

  1. REFERENCES
  2. M. Aoyama, "Component-based software engineering: can it change the way of software development?", Proc. of the 20th International Conference on Software Engineering, vol. 2, 1998, pp. 24-27.
  3. B. W. Boehm, et al, Characteristics of Software Quality, North-Holland, 1978.
  4. G. Caldiera, and V. R. Basili, "The qualification of reusable software components", pp. 117-119 in [8].
  5. A. Dunsmore and M. Roper, "A Comparative Evaluation of Program Comprehension Measures"，The Journal of Systems and Software，vol. 52，no. 3，2000, pp. 121-129 .
  6. T. L. Graves, A. F. Karr, J. S. Marron, and H. Siy, "Predicting fault incidence using software change history," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 26, no. 7, 2000, pp. 653-661.
  7. A. A. Porter, H. P. Siy, C. A. Toman, and L. G. Votta, "An experiment to assess the cost-benefits of code inspections in large scale software development," IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 23, no. 6, 1997, pp. 329-346.
  8. Sidney Siegel, and N. John Castellan, Jr., Nonparametric Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences (second edition), McGRAW-HILL Inc., ISBN 0-07-057357-3, 1988.
  9. W. Schafer, R. Prieto-Diaz, M. Matsumoto, Software Reusability, Ellis Horwood Limited, 1994, pp.117.
  10. K. Shima, Y. Takemura, and K. Matsumoto, "An approach to experimental evaluation of software understandability," Proc. of International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering (ISESE2002), IEEE Computer Society Press, 2002, pp.48-55.
  11. E. Soloway and K. Ehrlich, "Empirical Studies of Programming Knowledge", IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. SE-10, No. 5, 1984, pp. 595-609.