Many comp lexity metrics have been proposed to help predict the cost and effort of p roducing new software systems. However\, more than 80% of the effort assoc iated with a software project is not in its initial development\, but rath er in its evolution and maintenance. Existing complexity metrics have been shown to be more or less isomorphic to simple code size\, and are of litt le help in predicting potential maintenance effort\, other than observing that bigger systems require more work.
In this t
alk I will step back and ask the question \"what makes software maintenanc
e difficult?\" Beginning with a reminder of the limitations of programmers
as human beings and drawing from observations from software maintenance r
esearch\, we will explore the known and unknown causes of difficulty in so
ftware maintenance in search of a feature-based metric that can capture wh
at really makes maintenance hard.
Surprisingly\, we will discover that
it all boils down to one thing: there is no problem in software maintenan
ce that cannot be made worse by another level of indirection. Based on thi
s observation\, I will conclude with a concrete proposal for a new kind of
feature-based software complexity metric\, and demonstrate its applicatio
n to estimating the complexity of \"make\"-based build systems.
Bio
Dr. Cordy received his BSc in computer science and mathematics fro
m the University of Toronto in 1973 and his MSc in computer science in 197
6. After serving several years as chief programmer and senior research ass
ociate at the Computer Systems Research Institute of the University of Tor
onto\, he returned to school and received his PhD from the University of T
oronto in 1986. Following ten years at Queen's University he left to found
Legasys Corporation in 1995 where he was vice president and chief researc
h officer until his return to Queen's in 2001.
Dr. Cordy is a past member and chair of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) grant selection committee in Computing and Information S cience\, a recent distinguished scientist member of the NSERC E.W.R. Steac ie Awards Committee and an emeritus member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 2.4\, \"software implemen tation technology.\" He is a registered professional engineer\, a Senior M ember of the IEEE\, a Distinguished Scientist member of the Association fo r Computing Machinery and an IBM Visiting Scientist and Faculty Fellow.
Prof. Cordy recently served as program co-chair of the IEEE 2002 and 2008 International Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SC AM)\, the IEEE 2005 International Workshop on Program Comprehension (IWPC 2005) and the IBM 2005 Centre for Advanced Studies Conference (CASCON 2005 ). He served as industrial co-chair of the IEEE 2002\, 2004 and 2005 Inter national Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM )\, as co-organizer of t he Dagstuhl International Seminar on Transformation Techniques in Software Engineering (2005)\, and as program chair of the IEEE 4th International C onference on Computer Languages (ICCL'92). He serves on the program commit tees of numerous conferences and workshops in software systems and languag es\, on the editorial board of several journals\, books and special issues \, and as session chair at many conferences.
In 1990-91 Dr. Cordy w as invited to be guest researcher at GMD (now part of the Fraunhofer Insti tute)\, the German National Institute for Computer Science\, in Karlsruhe\ , Germany\, and in 2004-05 he was again invited as guest researcher\, at t he Automated Reasoning Systems Division of ITC-IRST\, the Provincial Cente r for Scientific and Technological Research in Trento\, Italy. Since 2013\ , Dr. Cordy is one of five cfaed Grand Professors.
DTSTAMP:20260519T150858Z CREATED:20151114T074228Z LAST-MODIFIED:20160106T075508Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR