Prediction of Maintainability From Design Measures
Michael M. Pickard, Brad Carter · 1993
It is well known that maintenance requires more than half of the entire life cycle costs for most large software systems. Therefore, an improvement in the maintainability of a software product has the potential of significant life cycle cost reduction, with greatest savings coming from improvements made early in the development (e.g., in early design rather than coding). An important research issue is the study of measures during early design that will assist in predicting the maintainability of the product under development. This paper surveys various efforts to relate design metrics and maintainability, it presents a framework for predicting maintainability from design metrics, and it reports some results of a field study of the relationship of information flow and maintainability for three organizations and over 250 COBOL programs.