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Deriving Metrics for Relating Complexity Measures to Software Maintenance Costs

Managers of software maintenance functions know that maintenance costs often increase with the age of software, and that maintenance costs are frequently proportional to software complexity. When the service to expense ratio degrades, sometimes a rewrite of the software results in a payoff. This research is a case study, presenting factors which contributed to the expense of one maintenance function. A descriptive model was used. It is suggested how the descriptive model could be a building block toward the derivation of a predictive model. A predictive model could be used in the preparation of a breakeven/payoff analysis, justifying the expense of rewriting existing software to contain minimum complexity by incorporating modern techniques.