Legacy software evaluation model for outsourced maintainer

Outsourcing has become common practice in the software industry. Organizations routinely subcontract the maintenance of their software assets to specialized companies. A great challenge for these companies, is to rapidly evaluate the quality of the systems they will have to maintain so as to accurately estimate the amount of work they will require. To answer these concerns, we developed a framework of metrics to evaluate the complexity of a legacy software system and help an outsourcing maintainer define its contracts. This framework was defined using a well known approach in software quality, called "goal-question-metric". We present the goal-question-metric approach, its results, and the initial experimentation of the metrics on five real life systems in Cobol.