In software engineering, the ease with which a software product can be modified in order to:
- correct defects
- meet new requirements
- make future maintenance easier, or
- cope with a changed environment;
these activities are known as software maintenance (cf. ISO 9126).
Maintainability Index is calculated with certain formulae from lines-of-code measures, McCabe measures and Halstead measures.
The measurment and track maintainability are intended to help reduce or reverse a system's tendency toward "code entropy" or degraded integrity, and to indicate when it becomes cheaper and less risky to rewrite the code instead to change it.
In telecommunication and several other engineering fields, the term maintainability has the following meanings:
- A characteristic of design and installation, expressed as the probability that an item will be retained in or restored to a specified condition within a given period of time, when the maintenance is performed in accordance with prescribed procedures and resources.
- The ease with which maintenance of a functional unit can be performed in accordance with prescribed requirements.
This article incorporates public domain material from the General Services Administration document "Federal Standard 1037C" (in support of MIL-STD-188).
[edit] See also
[edit] Further reading
- Blanchard S. B., Maintainability: A Key to Effective Serviceability and Maintenance Management, John Wiley & Sons Inc., NewYork 1995
- Ebeling C. E., An Introduction to Reliability and Maintainability Engineering, McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., Boston 1997.
- Patton J. D., Maintanability and Maintenance Management, Instrument Society of America, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 1988.
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