Simulator for Software Maintainability

According to IEEE Standard Glossary of Software Engineering Terminology: maintainability is the ease with which a software system or component can be modified to correct faults, improve performance or other attributes, or adapt to a changed environment. [1]. Maintainability can also be defined as the probability that a specified maintenance action on a specified item can be successfully performed (putting the item into a specified state) within a specified time interval by personnel of specified characteristics using specified tools and procedures [2]. Software under maintenance consists of finite number of states. The states have a specific operating efficiency. The maintenance process can bring the software from one sate to another within a specific time slot allotted to the software maintenance engineers. The software fails or reaches its maximum efficiency depends upon the nature of maintenance problems. In this paper an attempt has been made to develop a simulator to compute n–step transition probabilities successively until the software reaches steady state. This process is very much depicted by Markov analysis [3]. The software simulation tool designed here will be helpful for the software project managers in judging the maintenance efforts of the software. .