H. Gruber, R. Plösch, S. Schiffer, A. Hentschel: Calculating Software Maintenance Risk - A Practical Approach, Proceedings of 11th IASTED International Conference on Software Engineering (IASTED SE 2012), June 18-20, Cretan, Greece, 2012, Fraunhofer IESE Report, no. 035.12/E, Kaiserslautern, Germany July, 2012, doi:10.2316/P.2012.780-005
A fundamental question in software quality management is whether quality measures pay back their costs, i.e., whether they have a positive return on investment? This question especially arises during software maintenance when budgets are small, schedules are tight, and aged source code has to be dealt with. We propose a practical risk-based model that allows judging the cost effectiveness of quality measures by estimating risk as a monetary value using results of static code analysis tools.