An Example on Realizing Economics-Driven Software Mining
Rami Bahsoon, Wolfgang Emmerich · 2008
Economics-driven software mining (EDSM) sifts through the repository data to extract information that could be useful for reasoning about not only the technical aspects but also the economics properties related to the development and/or evolution of software systems, and in relation to the environments in which they are procured, developed, evolved and used. The objective is to provide the analyst with insights into investment decisions related to the development, maintenance, and evolution of software systems. EDSM can also assist the analyst in resource planning and utilization. In this paper, we define EDSM, describe a scenario for realizing EDSM, and provide an example. The example represents a small-size component-based distributed architecture, where we mined existing performance repositories to value the ranges in which a given software architecture can scale to support likely changes in load. The mining is based on a financial analogy. The mining step is then complemented with real options analysis to predict the values resulted from the ranges in which an architecture can scale under uncertainty, where uncertainty is attributed to the unpredicted change in load. The example shows the usefulness of EDSM in informing tradeoffs analysis in software design decision making.