Evaluation of Adaptability Level of Similar Functional Object-Oriented Software

Adaptability, as one of the external quality attributes of software, is of great importance in software engineering community especially now that the environment in which software products operate is becoming highly unpredictable due to rapid changes in computing technologies and operating system requirements and should therefore be a major concern to software developers at the design stage. Many researchers have analyzed and evaluated the source codes of different object-oriented software products to establish the absence and/or the level of presence of external quality factors like usability, testability, reusability, reliability, functionality and maintainability but are yet to evaluate such software codes to reveal their adaptability level not to talk of evaluating such level in a similar functional objectoriented software using multi-criteria decision analysis tool like analytic hierarchy process. This work therefore analyses the source codes of three school management software that is basically handling the same functions, which the researchers were privy to be part of the team members that developed the software, to reveal their adaptability level using software analyzer. The results are evaluated and compared using three different approaches: Weighted Scoring Method (WSM), direct computation from software analyzer and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) analysis. The multi-criteria decision strength of the three tools is also considered. Analysis from WSM and computation from software analyzer indicate software B as the one with higher level of adaptability while AHP indicates software C. This variation may be due to error level in the calculation of the metrics values by the software analyzer and the differences in source codes attributes such as number of classes and complexity level. Therefore, software B and C can be chosen when adaptability is to be considered as a software quality.