Integrated maintainability analysis: a practical case study

Working from preliminary time estimates and software expectations, a system for premature maintainability analysis and prediction for a parallel signal processing system was offered on schedule to the customer. Upon review, a mutual plan was agreed that further data was needed and would be obtained, throughout the fault isolation software development and formal testing. Early fault insertion data provided a new software design direction, physical time studies verified selection of the best tools, formal BIT diagnostic testing isolated some software corrections and provided significant data points along with the formal maintainability demonstration. Using the initial maintainability model as the controlling metric throughout the program, each time a change was observed that could effect one or more of the parameters in the model, a new prediction was calculated. These reiterative calculations, integrating the progression of data, provided a consistent measure of the teams progress and assured a final best estimate of the systems maintainability capability with a level of confidence acceptable to ourselves and our customer