Continuous Quality Control of Long-Lived Software Systems
Florian Deißenböck · mediaTUM – the media and publications repository of the Technical University Munich (Technical University Munich) · 2009
Die Dissertation wurde am 11.05.2009 bei der Technischen Universität München eingereicht Virtually any so�ware dependent organization has a vital interest in reducing its spending for so�ware maintenance activities. In addition to financial savings, for many organizations, the time needed to complete a so�ware maintenance task largely determines their ability to adapt their business processes to changing market situations or to implement innovative products and services. With the present yet increasing dependency on large scale so�ware systems, the ability to change existing so�ware in a timely and economical manner hence becomes critical for numerous enterprises of diverse branches. �e ability of a so�ware system to be changed and extended in an efficient manner is commonly referred to with the term maintainability. Despite its widely acknowledged importance, many so�ware developing organizations today do not explicitly define processes nor apply specialized techniques to ensure maintainability. �is is especially precarious as the quality of so�ware systems typically undergoes a gradual decay in the process of their evolution and therefore needs to be controlled continuously. We claim that a major obstacle to a mature discipline of maintainability engineering