Cost-benefit analysis of software quality models

Software reliability is increasingly important in today's marketplace. When traditional software development processes fail to deliver the level of reliability demanded by customers, radical changes in software development processes may be needed. Business process reengineering (BPR) is the popular term for comprehensive redesign of business processes. This paper focuses on the business processes that produce commercial software, and illustrates the central role that models have in implementation of BPR. Software metrics and software-quality modeling technology enable reengineering of software development processes, moving from a static process model to a dynamic one that adapts to the expected quality of each module. We present a method for cost-benefit analysis of BPR of software development processes as a function of model accuracy. The paper defines costs, benefits, profit, and return on investment from both short-term and long-term perspectives. The long-term perspective explicitly accounts for software maintenance efforts. A case study of a very large legacy telecommunications system illustrates the method. The dependent variable of the software-quality model was whether a module will have faults discovered by customers. The independent variables were software product and process metrics. In an example, the costs and benefits of using the model are compared to using random selection of modules for reliability enhancement. Such a cost-benefit analysis clarifies the implications of following model recommendations.