An Activity-Based Quality Model for Maintainability

Maintainability is a key quality attribute of successful software systems. However, its management in practice is still problematic. Currently, there is no comprehensive basis for assessing and improving the maintainability of software systems. Quality models have been proposed to solve this problem. Nevertheless, existing approaches do not explicitly take into account the maintenance activities, that largely determine the software maintenance effort. This paper proposes a 2-dimensional model of maintainability that explicitly associates system properties with the activities carried out during maintenance. The separation of activities and properties facilitates the identification of sound quality criteria and allows to reason about their interdependencies. This transforms the quality model into a structured and comprehensive quality knowledge base that is usable in industrial project environments. For example, review guidelines can be generated from it. The model is based on an expli...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICSM
• Authors: Florian Deissenboeck, Stefan Wagner, Markus Pizka, Stefan Teuchert, Jean-Francois Girard
• Keywords: ICSM 2007, Key Quality Attribute, Maintainability, Quality Model, Software Engineering