A cost model based on software maintainability

In this paper we present a maintainability based model for estimating the costs of developing source code in its evolution phase. Our model adopts the concept of entropy in thermodynamics, which is used to measure the disorder of a system. In our model, we use maintainability for measuring disorder (i.e. entropy) of the source code of a software system. We evaluated our model on three proprietary and two open source real world software systems implemented in Java, and found that the maintainability of these evolving software is decreasing over time. Furthermore, maintainability and development costs are in exponential relationship with each other. We also found that our model is able to predict future development costs with high accuracy in these systems.

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