Measuring and Evaluating a DotNet Application System to Better Predict Maintenance Effort

The ISO standard 9126 defines the basic quality criteria for evaluating a software product and suggests a suite of metrics for measuring them, however it remains for the user of the standard to apply those metrics to his particular situation. This paper describes how the metrics were extended to assess the static quality criteria as well as the complexity of a large Dot Net application. In addition, the size of the software was measured to be able to compare it with similar systems of the same type. The result was a comparative evaluation to aide the owners of that system in planning further maintenance and evolution activities. Besides that cost estimations were made for maintenance and further development. The measurement project described here is a practical example of how metrics can be applied to assess existing software systems.