Porting a Measurement Tool - a Case Study

Maintenance costs of Information Systems (ISs) are high and growing. Systems of poor quality demand more maintenance resources than systems of good quality. The quality of software can be measured when it is maintained. By improving the quality of maintenance prone modules future maintenance costs may be lowered for those modules. In this article we will present a case study of porting a measurement tool into a large organization with a set of chosen quality criteria and metrics. We will focus on the process of preparing for the validation by performing interviews with the people responsible for the maintenance of the applications in this case study. Keywords Software quality, software metrics, metrics database, measurement tool, validation, case study 1. Introduction Most of the yearly software budget is normally spent on maintenance of existing information systems [Art88,Boe81,LiSw80:]. Systems of poor quality demand more maintenance resources than systems of good quality. Developmen..