An Activity-Based Quality Model for Maintainability
Florian Deissenboeck, Stefan Wagner, Markus Pizka, Stefan Teuchert, J. -f. Girard, Man Nutzfahrzeuge Ag · 2007
Maintainability is a key quality attribute of successful software systems. However, its management in practice is still problematic. Currently, there is no comprehensive basis for assessing and improving the maintainability of software systems. Quality models have been proposed to solve this problem. However, existing approaches do not explicitly take into account the maintenance activities, that largely determine software maintenance effort. This paper proposes a 2-dimensional model of maintainability that ex-plicitly associates system properties with the activities car-ried out during maintenance. The separation of activities and properties facilitates the identification of sound qual-ity criteria and allows to reason about their interdependen-cies. This transforms the quality model into a structured and comprehensive quality knowledge base that is usable in real project environments. For example, review guidelines can be generated from it. The model is based on an explicit quality metamodel that supports its systematic construction and fosters preciseness as well as completeness. An indus-trial case study demonstrates the applicability of the model for the evaluation of the maintainability of Matlab Simulink models that are frequently used in model-based develop-ment of embedded systems. 1.