A novel model for improving the maintainability of web-based systems

Web applications incorporate important business assets and offer a convenient way for businesses to promote their services through the internet. Many of these web applica- tions have evolved from simple HTML pages to complex applications that have a high maintenance cost. This is due to the inherent characteristics of web applications, to the fast internet evolution and to the pressing market which imposes short development cycles and frequent modifications. In order to control the maintenance cost, quantita- tive metrics and models for predicting web applications’ maintainability must be used. Maintainability metrics and models can be useful for predicting maintenance cost, risky components and can help in assessing and choosing between different software artifacts. Since, web applications are different from traditional software systems, models and met- rics for traditional systems can not be applied with confidence to web applications. Web applications have special features such as hypertext structure, dynamic code generation and heterogenousity that can not be captured by traditional and object-oriented metrics. This research explores empirically the relationships between new UML design met- rics based on Conallen’s extension for web applications and maintainability. UML web design metrics are used to gauge whether the maintainability of a system can be im- proved by comparing and correlating the results with different measures of maintain- ability. We studied the relationship between our UML metrics and the following main- tainability measures: Understandability Time (the time spent on understanding the soft- ware artifact in order to complete the questionnaire), Modifiability Time(the time spent on identifying places for modification and making those modifications on the software artifact), LOC (absolute net value of the total number of lines added and deleted for com- ponents in a class diagram), and nRev (total number of revisions for components in a class diagram). Our results gave an indication that there is a possibility for a relationship to exist between our metrics and modifiability time. However, the results did not show statistical significance on the effect of the metrics on understandability time. Our results showed that there is a relationship between our metrics and LOC(Lines of Code). We found that the following metrics NAssoc, NClientScriptsComp, NServerScriptsComp, and CoupEntropy explained the effort measured by LOC(Lines of Code). We found that NC, and CoupEntropy metrics explained the effort measured by nRev(Number of Revi- sions). Our results give a first indication of the usefulness of the UML design metrics, they show that there is a reasonable chance that useful prediction models can be built from early UML design metrics

WapMetrics: a tool for computing UML design metrics for Web applications

Many companies are still asking how to assess and predict the maintenance cost of their software. Measures of software maintenance cost can be taken either late or early in the development process. Early measures of software maintenance cost are beneficial because they can help in allocating project resources efficiently, predicting the effort of maintenance tasks and controlling the maintenance process. This paper describes a tool for computing early metrics from UML class diagrams based on the Web Application Extension (WAE) for UML. A case study is used to show the usefulness and effectiveness of the tool

Working Conditions Laws Report 2012: A Global Review

[Excerpt] Labour legislation to address working conditions can cover an array of subjects that affect the employment relationship and workers’ well-being in the workplace. This report will focus on legislation regarding three important elements: working time (Chapter 1), maternity protection (Chapter 2), and minimum wages (Chapter 3). The material used in this study will be drawn predominantly from the ILO Working Conditions Laws Database, which was most recently updated in 2011-2012 (see Box 1 below). Given that the information in the database covers a vast amount of legal information from over 150 countries, this report will focus on selected essential provisions. The framework for presenting the national legislative information in this publication is based on the structure of the relevant ILO Conventions and Recommendations for each subject, which is meant to help provide a simple method for presentation and comparison. This report builds upon previous editions produced in 2010 and 2008. The reports of 2008 and 2010, which used a similar framework to present the material, were based mainly on regions of the world. However, while the 2008 and 2010 reports disaggregated industrialised countries and CIS and Eastern European countries in Europe, for the 2012 edition a framework is adopted that better reflects the data contained in the Working Conditions Law Database and the working conditions legislation that exists in different regions of the world. Thus, while in the information in all other regions is ordered the same manner, the industrialised countries have been placed in the appropriate regions and the Eastern European countries have been classified with Europe and CIS countries