contact
Dr. Guenther Ruhe
Software Engineering Decision Support Laboratory University of Calgary 2500 University Drive NW Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4 Tel (403) 220 7692 Fax (403)284 4707 Email: ruhe@ucalgary.ca

Project Name:

Mining Repositories for Optimized Embedded Software Life-cycle Effort Allocation

NSERC ENGAGE Project

NovAtel is a leading provider for a comprehensive line of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) products. NovAtel is in the process to introduce more flexible development processes with shorter iterations and earlier feedback cycles, the questions becomes how to tune the development process to achieve best results. Modeling and documentation is considered important for communication and collaborative development, but how much {modeling, documentation} is enough to ensure "optimal" performance in subsequent maintenance processes? Not having the correct artifacts (subsumes models, documents) can increase costs late in the lifecycle when staff has to expend extra effort in finding adequate information to support their tasks. These costs later in the lifecycle have to be balanced against the upfront costs related to creating the artifacts in the earlier stages of the lifecycle.

The overall goal of the collaboration project is to design, implement and evaluate a methodology for optimizing the artefact suite used during the development process. The ENGAGE project is intended to perform initial modeling of the maintenance process with all the key parameters influencing the cost and value of maintenance. The ultimate goal is to achieve maintainability of products at lower cost without making any trade-off related to timely delivery and quality of the product. Software maintainability is defined as the capability of the software systems to be modified. Modifications may include corrections, improvements or adaptation of the software systems to changes in the environment, and in requirements and functional specifications.