Assessing the maintainability of C++ source code
Marius Sundbakken · Research Exchange (Washington State University) · 2001
Maintenance refers to the modifications made to software systems after their first release.It is not possible to develop a significant software system that does not need maintenance because change, and hence maintenance, is an inherent characteristic of software systems.It has been estimated that it costs 80% more to maintain software than to develop it.Clearly, maintenance is the major expense in the lifetime of a software product.Predicting the maintenance effort is therefore vital for cost-effective design and development.Automated techniques that can quantify the maintainability of objectoriented designs would be very useful.Models based on metrics for object-oriented source code are necessary to assess software quality and predict engineering effort.This thesis will look at C++, one of the most widely used object-oriented programming languages in academia and industry today.Metrics based models that assess the maintainability of the source code using object-oriented software metrics are developed.