Metrics for controlling effort during adaptive maintenance of object oriented systems

Object oriented modeling has been largely adopted in industry in the last few years. Several systems built 4 or 5 years ago may need an adaptive maintenance process in order to better satisfy market and customer needs. A model for effort estimation/prediction of the adaptive maintenance is presented. A selection of metrics for effort estimation has been applied to the general model for evaluating maintenance effort. The metrics presented have been validated against real data. The validation presented has shown that some metrics that can be profitably employed for effort estimation/prediction can be also used with success for the estimation/prediction of the maintenance effort. Moreover the results obtained give some guidelines for maintenance of control of relevant factors for adaptive maintenance.