One of the major concerns of any maintenance organization is how
to estimate the cost of subsequent releases of software systems. Planning
the next release, maximizing the increase in functionality and improving
the quality are vital to successful maintenance management. The objective
of this paper is to present the results of a case study in which an
incremental and inductive approach was used to build a model for
predicting software maintenance releases in a large-scale software
maintenance organization. This study was conducted in the Flight Dynamics
Division (FDD) of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). This
organization is representative of many other software maintenance
organizations. Over one hundred software systems totalling about 4.5
million lines of code are maintained by this organization. Many of these
systems have been maintained for many years and regularly produce new
releases. The maintenance costs in this organization have increased
considerably over the last few years. This paper shows the predictive
model developed for the FDD's software maintenance release process.
Lessons learned during the establishment of a measurement-based software
maintenance improvement program in this organization are also described
and future work is outlined.
(Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-95-79