Quality-Driven Software Development for Maintenance

Software maintenance is sometimes considered as a special kind of activity that is separated from a software development process. Meanwhile, the opposite is true; maintenance should be taken into account from the beginning of the software development process. Because a model-based software development is the prevailing software development paradigm, the maintainability should be considered within models that arise in software development process. We claim that the quality of the models arising in the software development process has a positive influence on their maintainability: the higher quality of the models, the more effective maintainability activity. The background for our consideration is MDA approach, and the scope of the consideration is limited to perfective maintenance only. The set of so called 6C quality characteristics is assumed to define a quality of MDA-models. Our selection of 6C quality characteristics is justified by the fact that they are related to activities performed on models within the maintenance. To assess MDA-models in the context of the maintainability, we define checklists for the 6C characteristics. These checklists are used for derivation of some measures which are useful in checking to what scope a given characteristics is satisfied. The main advantage of the approach is its independence of the knowledge of future changes of user requirements that trigger perfective maintenance. In the chapter, we demonstrate a simple example of how to assess the quality of PIM-models that are the realization of the CIM-model. Additionally, we discuss how to select, for further development, the best PIM-model from the set of possible solution.