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Cited by 334

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 16 of the 16 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Software complexity and maintenance costs

Banker, Rajiv D., Datar, Srikant M., Kemerer, Chris F., Zweig, Dani·1993·Communications of the ACM

Abstract

The effects of software complexity on the costs of Cobol maintenance projects within a large commercial bank are examined, and the impact of software complexity on the costs of software maintenance projects in a traditional information-system (IS) environment is estimated using a previously developed economic model of software maintenance. The model uses a multidimensional approach to measuring software complexity; other project factors that can be controlled by managers and that are believed to affect maintenance project costs are controlled for by the model. It is shown that software maintenance costs are affected significantly by software complexity in terms of module size, procedure size, and branching complexity. Dollar estimates are provided of the magnitude of the impact of software complexity on maintenance costs at a typical commercial site; the costs are high enough to justify complexity control and monitoring.

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Metadata

Authors
Banker, R. D., Datar, S. M., Kemerer, C. F., & Zweig, D.
Venue
Communications of the ACM
Published
1993-11
Volume
36
Issue
11
Pages
81-94
ISSN
  • 0001-0782 (ISSN-L)
  • 1557-7317
OpenAlex
W2159118518
Cited by
334
References
16
FWCI
33.06
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Software complexity and maintenance costs. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/163359.163375
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Banker, R. D., Datar, S. M., Kemerer, C. F., & Zweig, D. (1993). Software complexity and maintenance costs. Communications of the ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/163359.163375

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.