Certifying the reliability of software
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Resolving the software science anomaly
Journal of Systems and Software
An empirical study of three common software complexity measures
SAC '93 Proceedings of the 1993 ACM/SIGAPP symposium on Applied computing: states of the art and practice
Software complexity and maintenance costs
Communications of the ACM
Statistical testing of software based on a usage model
Software—Practice & Experience
Foundations of software measurement
Foundations of software measurement
A comparison of measurement and defect characteristics of new and legacy software systems
Journal of Systems and Software
Software Engineering: Theory and Practice
Software Engineering: Theory and Practice
Object-Oriented and Classical Software Engineering
Object-Oriented and Classical Software Engineering
Operational Profiles in Software-Reliability Engineering
IEEE Software
Quantitative Analysis of Faults and Failures in a Complex Software System
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Predicting the Order of Fault-Prone Modules in Legacy Software
ISSRE '98 Proceedings of the The Ninth International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering
Determinants of software volatility: a field study
Journal of Software Maintenance: Research and Practice
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Legacy software maintenance is a significant cost item for many engineering organizations. This study is a preliminary report on work to investigate maintenance data, usage, and source code for legacy software used by an engineering design company to support a variety of functions, including electromagnetic, thermal, mechanical loading, vibration, and aerodynamic analysis. The results verify the applicability to legacy engineering software of previous research that concluded that size and structural metrics alone are not good indicators of high maintenance costs. Unlike previous research, the study also evaluates the effect of program usage on maintenance cost. Over the three-year period of this study of 71 legacy engineering programs, 11 of the programs (15%) accounted for 80% of all maintenance and 67% of all program runs. The highest maintenance programs were not always the largest programs or the worst structured programs. 49 % of the programs accounted for only 1% of total maintenance but 42 % of the total lines of code (LOC) thus invalidating LOC as an indicator for maintenance cost. While additional work is needed to validate these findings across other organizations and other code sets, these preliminary results provide strong evidence that expected program usage can be a useful indicator of long-term maintenance cost.