Relation Between Software Metrics and Maintainability

International Journal, 2011

Abstract: The maintainability of the software system is becoming a very important characteristic due to growth in demand of quality software system. Software maintainability means the ease with which asoftware system or component can be modified to correct ...

Proceedings of the ACM-IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering and measurement - ESEM '12, 2012

Context: Many metrics are used in software engineering research as surrogates for maintainability of software systems. Aim: Our aim was to investigate whether such metrics are consistent among themselves and the extent to which they predict maintenance effort at the entire system level. Method: The Maintainability Index, a set of structural measures, two code smells (Feature Envy and God Class) and size were applied to a set of four functionally equivalent systems. The metrics were compared with each other and with the outcome of a study in which six developers were hired to perform three maintenance tasks on the same systems. Results: The metrics were not mutually consistent. Only system size and low cohesion were strongly associated with increased maintenance effort. Conclusion: Apart from size, surrogate maintainability measures may not reflect future maintenance effort. Surrogates need to be evaluated in the contexts for which they will be used. While traditional metrics are used to identify problematic areas in the code, the improvements of the worst areas may, inadvertently, lead to more problems for the entire system. Our results suggest that local improvements should be accompanied by an evaluation at the system level.

Procedia Computer Science, 2015

In this study, empirically investigates the relationship of existing class level object-oriented metrics with a quality parameter i.e., maintainability. Here, different subset of Object-Oriented software metrics have been considered to provide requisite input data to design the models for predicting maintainability using Neuro-Genetic algorithm (hybrid approach of neural network and genetic algorithm). This technique is applied to estimate maintainability on two different case studies such as Quality Evaluation System (QUES) and User Interface System (UIMS). The performance parameters of this technique are evaluated based on the basis of Mean absolute error (MAE), Mean Absolute Relative Error (MARE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and Standard Error of the Mean (SEM). The results reported that the identified subset metrics demonstrated an improved maintainability prediction with higher accuracy.

Maintainability can be a key factor concerning the success of a software product, since the majority of software life cycle costs is spent on maintenance. Therefore, there is a deep interest in analyzing and assessing the maintainability of a software product with the objective of identifying the need for action and subsequently minimizing maintenance expenses. Often software quality metrics are used to analyze the influencing factors of maintainability while an expert uses their results for the assessment. However, these metrics are distributed across several tools, dashboards, and literature. Moreover, there are further quality indicators for analyzing the maintainability that cannot be evaluated automatically by means of metrics. Hence, we aim to develop a quality report containing well-known quality metrics and further quality indicators that allows an expert to assess the system under review regarding its maintainability. For this reason, we conducted an exploratory survey in t...

Measurement of maintainability early in the software development life cycle, especially during the design phase, may aid designers in incorporating necessary improvements and adjustments to enhance the maintainability of the completed product. In order to demonstrate the importance and necessity of software maintainability during the design phase, this paper expands the (MEMOOD) metrics model, which estimates the maintainability of class diagrams in terms of their understandability and modifiability, to create a multivariate linear model called "Maintainability Estimation Framework and Metrics for Object Oriented Software (MEFOOS)" during the design phase. Thus, class diagrams' maintainability is estimated in terms of their understandability, modifiability, and analyzability in the developed model. This study attempts, as a first effort, to create a relationship between object-oriented design features and maintainability elements analyzability, understandability, and m...

The mapping of draft standards work in the area of product quality measurement to industry practice has lead to a discussion on the importance of the previous knowledge of the design and support environment is necessary for correct interpretation of static source code metrics. We have found no intersection between the proposed internal metrics of the ISO9126 draft standard and the one extracted with our tool (Datrix). This has lead us to present a mapping and rationale for each Datrix Domain for the four ISO 9126 maintainabilty sub-characteristics.

2010

The software is always required to be developed and maintained a quality to the rapid progresses in industry, technology, economy, and other fields. Thus, software maintainability is the major activity in the software life cycle. This process bypass the cost required to develop new software product. However, software maintenance costs often total twice the original development cost in the lifetime of application software. Therefore, software maintainability is considered as one of the most important quality factor in software quality models. This study introduces a software maintenance process model that emphasizes the impact of the software quality on the maintenance and considers the quality of the modified software.

Abstract—Software maintainability is defined as the ease with which modifications could be made in to the software once it is delivered to the customer. While evaluating the quality of the software product, software maintainability is one of the most important aspects and it is desirable that the software should be designed and coded in such a way that it becomes more maintainable. Tracking the maintenance behavior of the software product is very complex and widely acknowledged by the researchers. We can accurately measure 'maintainability' of any software once it comes into operations but it would be too late by then, hence much has been examined in literature to measure the maintainability before software start operations by making use of software design metrics. It has proved empirically many times that there exists strong relationship between software design metrics and its corresponding maintainability. However, the framework and reference architecture in which the softwares are developing now days have changed dramatically as they make heavy use of databases. There is a strong need to re-define the relationship between software design metrics with subsequent maintainability in this changed scenario. In an attempt to address this issue quantitatively, we have proposed new suite of metrics by the induction of two new metrics which are more important and meaningful in data intensive applications. To analyze the proposed metric suite, their values are computed on five real-life applications which make use of databases with a great deal. The result shows that proposed new metrics suite is very effective indicator of software maintainability in the environment which provide remote connections to the server for accessing large database files. Based on the results it can be reasonably claimed that new metrics suite proposed in the current study would be able to predict software maintainability more precisely and accurately for those applications which makes heavy use of databases during operations.

Lack of a commonly defined maintainability model hinders us from evaluating and certifying products with respect to maintainability. We cannot compare different products within and across organisations. We have difficulties to evolve and maintain software. We cannot try new development paradigms and evaluate their effects on product maintainability. We have no commonly defined maintainability model to base our software engineering research. In this paper, we outline a suggestion for a model of maintainability. We advocate to the software community to gather its resources in order to develop the model. Such a model would have a substantial long-term impact within research, industry, standardisation authorities and education. This paper lists ideas for a maintainability model with the aim to provide an initial milestone for ample discussion within the software engineering community.

: Software engineering has become one of the emerging research areas with extensive use of software in the industrial world. Software must be well developed and well maintained to adapt to ever changing requirements of the competitive world. The paper is targeted to present the record of various maintainability techniques or models used so far for software and its applications be it object oriented paradigms or web based applications. This paper reveals all about various parameters including both source code metrics and design metrics used for measuring maintainability of software systems by collecting datasets from different fields including industries, research centres and student projects.