Software maintenance claims a large proportion of organizational resources. It is thought that many maintenance problems derive from inadequate software design and development practices. Poor design choices can result in complex software that is costly to support and difficult to change. However, it is difficult to assess the actual maintenance performance effects of software development practices because their impact is realized over the software life cycle. To estimate the impact of development activities in a more practical time frame, this research develops a two-stage model in which software complexity is a key intermediate variable that links design and development decisions to their downstream effects on software maintenance. The research analyzes data collected from a national mass merchandising retailer on 29 software enhancement projects and 23 software applications in a large IBM COBOL environment. Results indicate that the use of a code generator in development is associated with increased software complexity and software enhancement project effort. The use of packaged software is associated with decreased software complexity and software enhancement effort. These results suggest an important link between software development practices and maintenance performance.

An exploratory study was conducted (a) to examine whether experieticed software managers could generate accurate estimates of effort required for proposed software projects and (b) to document the strategies they bring to bear in their estimations. Five experienced software project managers served as expert subjects for the study. Each manager was first asked to sort a set of 37 commonly-used estimation parameters according to Ibe importance of their effect on effort estimation. Once this task was completed, the manager was then presented with data from ten actual software projects, one at a time, and asked to estimate the effort (in worker-months) required to complete the projects. The project sizes ranged from 39,000 to 450,000 lines of code and varied from 23 to 1,107 worker-months to complete. All managers were tested individually. The results were compared to those of two popular analytical models—Function Points and COCOMO. Results show that the managers made more accurate estimates than the uncalibrated analytical models. Additionally, a process-tracing analysis revealed that the managers used two

agers to predict and plan for maintenance more effectively. In addition, our results suggest the use of code generators as a means of reducing repair maintenance. 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Softw. Maint., 9, 235--251 (1997) No. of Figures: 0. No. of Tables: 10. No. of References: 31. KEY WORDS: software maintenance; software complexity; software management; code generators; strategic systems; cyclomatic complexity 1. INTRODUCTION While it is well understood that software maintenance requires a significant amount of organizational resources, there exists a relative shortage of quantitative empirical research * Correspondence: Sandra A. Slaughter, 314A GSIA, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, U.S.A. E-mail: sandras+#andrew.cmu.edu Contact grant sponsor: Carengie Mellon University Contact grant sponsor: University of Minnesota CCC 1040--550X/97/040235--17$17.50 Received 21 February 1997 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Revised 26 April 1997 devoted to impro

Learning from high performance projects is crucial for software process improvement. Therefore, we need to identify outstanding projects that may serve as role models. It is common to measure productivity as an indicator of performance. It is vital that productivity measurements deal correctly with variable returns to scale and multivariate data. Software projects generally exhibit variable returns to scale, and the output from ERP projects is multivariate. We propose to use Data Envelopment Analysis Variable Returns to Scale (DEA VRS) to measure the productivity of software projects. DEA VRS fulfils the two requirements stated above, and to our knowledge, it is the only method complying with them. The results from this empirical study of 30 ERP projects extracted from a benchmarking database in Accenture identified six projects as potential role models. These projects deserve to be studied and probably copied as part of a software process improvement initiative. The results also suggest that there is a 50 % potential for productivity improvement, on average. Finally, the results support the assumption of variable returns to scale in ERP projects. We recommend DEA VRS be used as the default technique for appropriate productivity comparisons of software projects. Used together with methods for hypothesis testing, DEA VRS is also a useful technique for assessing the effect of alleged process improvements.

Growing competition in the investment banking industry has given rise to increasing demand for high functionality software applications that can be developed in a short period of time. Yet de-livering such applications creates a bottleneck in software development activities. This dilemma can be addressed when firms shift to develop-ment methods that emphasize software (eusabili-ty. This article examines the productivity implications of object and repository-based in-tegrated computer-aided software engineering (ICASE) software development in the context of a major investment bank's information systems strategy. The strategy emphasizes software

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at Boston University, ETH Zürich,