A Framework for the Management of Preventive Maintenance

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Software plays a critical role in our everyday life as more and more of our activities involve the use of software systems from online bank transactions and e-government services to mobile applications in our phones. However, software systems must be constantly updated to address new customer needs, fix errors, improve the performance and response time, and adopt new technologies and infrastructures. The cost of performing the aforementioned maintenance activities highly depends on the underlying design quality of the software systems. In general, software systems that are not well-designed require much more time and effort to make changes, and vice versa. Nowadays, there exist several techniques and tools that analyze software systems and detect opportunities for improving their design quality. However, these opportunities are not equally important and beneficial. Performing a manual inspection to assess their impact is very time consuming and overwhelming for software maintainers, especially when their number is large and they resolve different types of design problems. The proposed research aims to transform the improvement of software design quality into a disciplined, systematic, and tool-supported practice by developing a framework for the automatic assessment and prioritization of design improvement opportunities based on their risks and benefits. The results of the proposed research will contribute to the effective reduction of maintenance cost in existing software systems, which in turn will lead to more reliable software with fewer errors, faster release times for new features, lower software/service prices, and better customer satisfaction in general.