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Today very little is known about if design models help as intended when maintaining a software product. It has been shown that only one of three of the changed classes during maintenance are predicted to change when implementing new requirements. Understanding the maintenance impact on object oriented systems improves the design models, methods and later the project planning. The main interest of this research is to empirically study how object oriented design models and the source code are impacted during maintenance. The study is implemented on an industrial system by detecting changes in the source code.
During 1998 Runesson has concentrated the efforts on two case studies:
Analysis of data from the PMR project gathered in his master's thesis and in Mikael Lindvall's doctoral thesis. A focus has been on the visibility of system changes in the design model.
An exploratory analysis of the current practice. (The earlier PMR project has been moved to Ericsson in India) The trend seems to be to use a framework for families of applications, which thus become smaller and are released more often. It also seems that design models are not used to a large extent anymore. Rather developers go directly from requirements to code. There still is a semantical gap between these and various candidates for filling this gap, such as reverse engineering and design patterns, have be investigated.
During 1999 Runesson was part of a team that analyzed the changes made to interfaces of a CORBA-based system. These interfaces are specified in an interface language, IDL, which give better design productivity compared to the earlier practise. The work resulted in a tentative checklist which allows the system engineer to reduce the cost of changes. A technical report was complied and was presented at the internal Ericsson Software Engineering Conference in June 1999. This research is discontinued due to Runesson's decision to take up an industrial career in May 1999.
Graduate student: Magnus Runesson (moved to IFS).
Supervisor: Kristian Sandahl.