An Empirical Evaluation of Iterative Maintenance Life Cycle Using XP

Abstract

Maintainability of a software product affects its maintenance cost and operational life. Maintainability of legacy systems, which have been developed through non-XP methodologies, has become a challenging issue for its maintenance. The iterative maintenance life cycle using extreme programming is an effective process for software maintenance [2]. This paper describes a controlled experiment that examines maintainability during maintenance of academic projects. The experiment was conducted with postgraduate students in a project course. The maintenance of each application was allocated to a couple of project teams; one team has used XP-based approach and yet another team has employed a traditional waterfall-based approach of maintenance. On measuring internal quality metrics of projects, it is observed that XP-based approach produces more maintainable code than traditional approach. The productivity of XP-based team is observed higher and at the same time, XP-based maintenance team was more confident about the code, and also reported higher confidence in future changes to their product. The iterative maintenance life cycle using XP has improved the maintainability of a software.

A Lifecycle Model for Web-based Application Development: Incorporating Agile and Plan-driven Methodology

“…Maintenance is to describe activities that address demands at code or near-code levels, which is applied for less complicated work due to the limited time and management control, i.e., to enable software to be fixed quickly so that the software can provide better services. Maintenance comprises of lightweight iterative processes based on user's/customer"s demands and may go many times but will not fundamentally change the Web-based application [36]. If new ideas or enhancements arise during the development cycle, it is first sent to wait state basket.…”