Research On Assessment Methodology Of Implement Effort Through Design Change Analysis

During today's software development process, an urgent issue to resolve is dealing with the change of software after which is delivered. An important factor of reducing software quality is the changes of software. Software maintenance is the process of handling software changes. Industry data shows that software maintenance has accounted more than 70 percent of the total cost of software development. Assessing the effort of system implemented, according to the appointed design change, is an important part of planning cost of software maintenance, which is also a basis of taking appropriate measures to further reduce the cost of software maintenance.Secondly, evolution of software development process and approach of object-oriented software development allow more frequent software changes, sustained changes have already begun before the delivery of software. It has become an urgent problem that identifying and assessing the implement effort of system by analyzing system changes in a higher-abstract level. The evolution of software development methods will increment changes, destroy system structure and reduce the software quality continuously. System development and frequent changes happen across the software life cycle. Therefore, it is of great significance that evaluating the effort of an iterative or evolution through the identification of mapping relationships between changes of different abstract level.Thirdly, a range of changes in the design of program will be come up with the same change requirement in the software development process of large-scale project and a variety choice of implement exist to the same design change. If the change cost of the design change can be identified before it is implemented, based on the implement effort, the best design plan can be chosen from multiple different change plans to reduce the cost of software maintenance.In addition, research on assessment methodology of implement effort through design change analysis is usually achieved by studying and defining the corresponding relationship between design change and code change. It is an effective method of resuming traceability links. Traceability links are the relationships among different models with different abstract level and forward build or reverse traceability links are often seen as an important process of software maintenance and evolution in coarse granularity and high-quality software.At the same time, scheduling the work of software project is a difficult task. An ideal schedule can be a mix of different factors, rational organization, allocation of available resources, parallel arrangement to ensure completion of development tasks within the specified limit time as far as possible. If the change cost of the design change can be identified before it is implemented, based on the implement effort, the change plan can be better scheduled during the process of software maintenance to achieve the job of maintenance.Finally, software quality has always been concerned by the research of software engineering. Software changeability is an important standard to measure software maintainability and a crucial quality factor related to software maintenance and evolution. The impact level and workload caused by the change of software design are important ways to measure software changeability. So, the study on assessment methodology of implement effort through design change analysis is the basis of software quality metrics.To sum up, looking at the corresponding relationship and impact to each other on different abstract levels and studying on assessment methodology of implement effort through design change analysis are important to estimate cost of software maintenance, promote the evolution of software and development of object-oriented software, recovery software traceability links, establish a reasonable schedule as well as software quality metrics. Therefore, this paper studies map relationships between different abstract levels and gives out a method to access the system implement effort according to the analysis of design change and the impact analysis.This paper mainly achieved the following parts in order to assess system implement effort based on design change:(1)The software design changes of object-oriented software are studied and a method of classification and description of design change is given out. This paper divides object-oriented design changes into two parts: atomic design change and composite design change. Atomic design change is composed by change type, type of change element, change element and properties of change element. Through iterative algorithms, composite design changes is an atomic design change collection which is formed by an atomic design change and other changes triggered by it.(2)The change of implement in object-oriented software is studied, a detailed classification of Java code is made and 12 kinds of atomic code changes are defined including delete a domain; Composite code change is defined in the forms of atomic code change collection which include atomic code change and changes that are triggered by it, through analyzing the dependence and the way of change spread among Java code.(3)A method, based on XMI, to describe the design change of object-oriented software is proposed. This method can recognize the software design change automatically by describing UML semantics by XMI.(4)The mapping relationships between design changes and code changes is Studied, 14 mapping rules on mapping atomic design changes such as class-self changes, changes of structure element in class and relationships between classes to code changes are proposed, and the process of mapping the composite design changes to code changes is discussed.(5)An assessment method is given out, which handles the effort of system implement. It assesses the implement effort by appointing weight value for each category code changes and calculating the sum of the change value.(6)A plug-in of Eclipse application of this method is developed to implement the design assessment methodology of implement effort through design change analysis, which is composed by three parts: module of identifying design change, module of mapping and code change analysis and module of computing system change effort. Module of identifying design change identifies design change; module of mapping and code change analysis implement mappings from design change to code change; module of computing system change effort gets the workload of implementing system change using method of pulsing weight value.(7)Open-source software XUI RIA Framework [30] is chosen as a case analysis, application of this method of analysis and system design changes to achieve the workload estimates by comparing the actual maintenance of historical data, verify the effectiveness of the method.The method of this paper starts from analyzing design changes, classifying design changes and mapping changes to code, then making change impact analysis on the code level, which avoids the complexity of making static impact analysis of code and the inaccurate result produced by analyzing design changes only, relative accurate results is acquired with higher efficiency.