Studies on maintainability and usability assessment for object oriented software system

Abstract

Maintainability and Usability are emerging software quality attributes which play a key role in determining the success or failure of the software system There is involvement of fuzzy aspects in the sub characteristics of maintainability and usability but little research efforts have been dedicated to considering how the design complexity metrics with combination of fuzzy aspects may impact on maintainability and usability of object oriented software system either qualitatively or quantitatively Few efforts are performed to evaluate maintainability and usability but without considering the fuzzy nature of its sub characteristics This thesis makes a contribution to the field of object oriented and software engineering in general by proposing and evaluating fuzzy maintainability model and usability model The proposed models can facilitate the quantitative value of maintainability and qualitative evaluation of usability model More specifically the research conducted as part of this thesis are Object oriented metrics were defined in a precise unambiguous and formal manner Fuzzy maintainability model is proposed and validated Index layer method and fuzzy approach is used to evaluate usability qualitatively Object oriented Quality model is proposed and evaluated using AHP A broader range of industrial scale experiments and analyses are required to fully demonstrate the practical applicability of the models This has been left to future work