A Practical Model for Measuring Maintainability

—The amount of effort needed to maintain a software system is related to the technical quality of the source code of that system. The ISO 9126 model for software product quality recognizes maintainability as one of the 6 main characteristics of software product quality, with adaptability, changeability, stability, and testability as subcharacteristics of maintainability. Remarkably, ISO 9126 does not provide a consensual set of measures for estimating maintainability on the basis of a system’s source code. On the other hand, the Maintainability Index has been proposed to calculate a single number that expresses the maintainability of a system. In this paper, we discuss several problems with the MI, and we identify a number of requirements to be fulfilled by a maintainability model to be usable in practice. We sketch a new maintainability model that alleviates most of these problems, and we discuss our experiences with using such as system for IT management consultancy activities.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: QUATIC
• Authors: Ilja Heitlager, Tobias Kuipers, Joost Visser
• Keywords: Communications, Maintainability, Maintainability Model, Quality Recognizes Maintainability, QUATIC 2007