Drivers of Cost

Keeping in mind that Maintenance and Testing and Debuging play a major role in the cost of a software we came to a conclusion that the following aspects could help in keeping these costs down :
 

• Specification of the Software
• Time and Accuracy constraints
• Felxibilty of design
• Required Reuse of the software
• Programmers' familiarity with the language and its tools
• Language simplicity
• Coupling Dependency Metric (CDM)
• Referential Dependency (declarations should remain unchanged)
• Structural Dependency (the internal organization of the software should remain unchanged)
• Data Integrity Dependency (vulnerability of data elements to change)
• Security of the Virtual Machine
• Safe Pointers
• Handling system exceptions
• Type checking
• Specification of software complexity
• Good software design
• Good debugging
• Low run-time costs Vs. Level of abstraction
• Easy interfacing
• Availability of language tools and libraries
• Ease of documentation
• Reusability of code