ARCHITECTURE BASED SOFTWARE QUALITY MAINTENANCE RIPPLE EFFECT ANALYSIS

One of the major challenges for software developer is to fulfill the quality requirements of the software systems. This emphasis on software quality has some serious implications in terms of customer satisfaction and system acceptance. Due to its significance, it is also considered as one of the major challenges to be met by software developer since s/he is responsible for fulfilling the quality requirements of the software systems. One way to address this challenge is to adopt architecture based software development. Software architecture as an artifact can be used to deal with software quality attributes (QA) such as maintainability, performance and reliability. Recently, the focus of business is transforming rapidly from manual to computer based automations. Resultantly, software intensive systems are becoming large and complex. This is enhancing our emphasis on system quality which ultimately gives rise to the need for software quality maintenance. In order to optimize the quality of the software maintenance in a rapidly changing environment, study of its ripple effect is very significant. In this paper, a methodology for architecture based quality maintenance ripple effect determination and analysis is proposed. A QA's Property-component connectivity matrix and component connectivity matrix for ripple effect analysis is also described. The methodology is illustrated and evaluated by using web content extraction application architecture. The advantages of the proposed methodology are also presented.