We describe a methodology for precise quantitative measurement of technology impact on software change effort. The methodology employs measures of small software changes to determine the effect of technology. We illustrate this approach in a detailed case study on the impact of using two particular technologies — a version-sensitive source code editor and a domain-engineered application environment — in a telecommunications product. In both cases, the change effort was reduced. The methodology can precisely measure cost savings in change effort and is simple and inexpensive, since it relies on information automatically collected by version control systems.
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Atkins et al. (2002) studied this question.
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