Research Design, as Independent of Methods

Objectives •Readers of this chapter should be in a better position to: •Understand the process of research design •Place their own and others work within a full cycle or programme of ongoing research •Understand why good research almost always involves a mixture of evidence •Defend themselves from those who want numbers and text to be enemies rather than allies •Argue that good research is more ethical for society than poor researc

Surveying the factors that influence maintainability: research design

We want to explore and analyse design decisions that influence maintainability of software. Software maintainability is important because the effort expended on changes and fixes in software is a major cost driver. We take an empirical, qualitative approach, by investigating cases where a change has cost more or less than comparable changes, and analysing the causes for those differences. We will use this analysis of causes as input to following research in which the individual contributions of a selection of those causes will be quantitatively analysed