A software engineering process to develop services within the Arrowhead project

Recent studies estimate that a high percentage of the entire software process cycle corresponds to its maintenance. There is a need to reduce the factors which trigger high maintenance costs due to software updates. This article presents a software engineering process to develop services that reduces maintenance costs. The process has been applied in the framework of the Arrowhead project and consists on refactoring parts of software developed in previous iterations and constructing new pieces according to a methodology. The methodology focuses on reducing software maintenance cost by improving its architectural design, facilitating code comprehension and code reusability, guaranteeing availability, identifying errors in the early stages of its development, and assuring requirement fulfilment before integrating the whole system. The article also analyses the benefits provided by each software engineering technique applied during the software engineering process.