An Estimation Method in the Reuse-Based Software Development for a Maintenance Service System and its Evaluation

Abstract

To develop a new piece of reuse-based software, the first task is to estimate the workload, the time, the human resource availability and their skill level, the reusable software resources, and the cost that is necessary for development. Consequently, the correct amounts of resources, such as development members and costs, must be prepared; then the development project can proceed. To accomplish such work as precisely as possible, some type of computer-assisted method is required for work to select and determine the modules to reuse, and to estimate the workload for their modification. Such software development for a maintenance service system would have to proceed with various types of specialized fields involved. Therefore, several different sections or companies might need to cooperate to make any estimation. In this paper, we propose an estimate support method using a software organization management tool that can visualize the relationships among the existing software modules, and estimate data linked to each module. The method allows investigation of the existing software to select reusable modules and gathers estimate data to produce an estimate for a development workload while taking into consideration of the complexity of every software module found. Furthermore, this paper describes an evaluation when the proposed method is used in a reuse-based software development project for a particular maintenance service system.