Estimation of fault reparation time in software maintenance phase

Abstract

Software maintenance phase involves modifying and making changes to software due to requirements changes and/or defects reported by users. At this phase, when defects are uncovered, users will inform the problem to software maintenance team. The team has to provide the users the estimated fixing time and then fix the errors. Fault reparation/fixing time of different kinds of errors may be varied due to fault types and program complexity. In this research, an approach to estimate fault reparation time is proposed. The exponential probability density function is mainly used to construct the estimation model. An evaluation of the approach is present by applying the approach to open source software projects. A comparison of fault reparation time estimation between considering fault types and without fault types is reported.