GERIATRIC ISSUES OF AGING SOFTWARE

Software has been a mainstay of business and government operations for more than 50 years. As a result, all large enterprises utilize aging software in significant amounts. Some companies exceed 5,000,000 function points in the total volume of their corporate software portfolios. Much of this software is now more than 10 years old, and some applications are more than 25 years old. Maintenance of aging software tends to become more difficult year by year since updates gradually destroy the original structure of the applications and increase its entropy. Aging software may also contain troublesome regions with very high error densities called “error-prone modules.” Repairs to aging software suffer from a phenomenon called “bad fix injection” or new defects accidentally introduced as a byproduct of fixing previous defects.

[1]  Ware Myers,et al.  Industrial strength software - effective management using measurement , 1997 .

[2]  Lowell Jay Arthur.  Software evolution: the software maintenance challenge , 1988 .

[3]  Thomas M. Pigoski.  Practical Software Maintenance: Best Practices for Managing Your Software Investment , 1996 .

[4]  Anas N. Al-Rabadi,et al.  A comparison of modified reconstructability analysis and Ashenhurst‐Curtis decomposition of Boolean functions , 2004 .

[5]  T. Capers Jones,et al.  Estimating software costs , 1998 .

[6]  Capers Jones.  The year 2000 software problem: Quantifying the cost and addressing the consequences , 2005, AI & SOCIETY.

[7]  Barry W. Boehm,et al.  Software Engineering Economics , 1993, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[8]  Marcey L. Abate,et al.  Measuring the Software Process , 2001, Technometrics.

[9]  Capers Jones.  Software quality - analysis and guidelines for success , 1997 .

[10]  Capers Jones,et al.  Applied software measurement (2nd ed.): assuring productivity and quality , 1996 .

[11]  Stephen H. Kan,et al.  Metrics and Models in Software Quality Engineering , 1994, SOEN.

[12]  Capers Jones,et al.  Patterns of software system failure and success , 1996 .

[13]  Capers Jones,et al.  Software Assessments, Benchmarks, and Best Practices , 2000 .

[14]  Penny Grubb,et al.  Software Maintenance: Concepts and Practice , 2003 .

[15]  John J. Marciniak,et al.  Encyclopedia of Software Engineering , 1994, Encyclopedia of Software Engineering.

[16]  Robert S. Arnold.  Software Reengineering , 1993 .

[17]  M. Shepperd,et al.  A critique of cyclomatic complexity as a software metric , 1988, Softw. Eng. J..

[18]  Capers Jones,et al.  Assessment and control of software risks , 1994, Yourdon Press Computing Series.