GERIATRIC ISSUES OF AGING SOFTWARE
Capers Jones · 2007
Software has been a mainstay of business and government operations for more than 50 years. As a result, all large enterprises utilize aging software in significant amounts. Some companies exceed 5,000,000 function points in the total volume of their corporate software portfolios. Much of this software is now more than 10 years old, and some applications are more than 25 years old. Maintenance of aging software tends to become more difficult year by year since updates gradually destroy the original structure of the applications and increase its entropy. Aging software may also contain troublesome regions with very high error densities called “error-prone modules.” Repairs to aging software suffer from a phenomenon called “bad fix injection” or new defects accidentally introduced as a byproduct of fixing previous defects.