By Nupul Kukreja
Software maintenance costs result from modifying your application to either support new use cases or update existing ones, along with the continual bug fixing after deployment. As much as 70-80% of the Total Ownership Cost (TCO) of the software can be attributed to maintenance costs alone!
Software maintenance activities can be classified as [1]:
- Corrective maintenance – costs due to modifying software to correct issues discovered after initial deployment (generally 20% of software maintenance costs)
- Adaptive maintenance – costs due to modifying a software solution to allow it to remain effective in a changing business environment (25% of software maintenance costs)
- Perfective maintenance – costs due to improving or enhancing a software solution to improve overall performance (generally 5% of software maintenance costs)
- Enhancements – costs due to continuing innovations (generally 50% or more of software maintenance costs)
Since maintenance costs eclipse other software engineering activities by large amount, it is imperative to answer the following question:
How maintainable is my application/source-code, really?
The answer to this question is non-trivial and requires further understanding of what does it mean for an application to be maintainable? Measuring software maintainability is non-trivial as there is no single metric to state if one application is more maintainable than the other and there is no single tool that can analyze your code repository and provide you with an accurate answer either. There is no substitute for a human reviewer, but even humans can’t analyze the entire code repositories to give a definitive answer. Some amount of automation is necessary.
So, how can you measure the maintainability of your application? To answer this question let’s dissect the definition of maintainability further. Imagine you have access to the source code of two applications – A and B. Let’s say you also have the super human ability to compare both of them in a small […]
