Exploring Maintainability Index Variants for Software Maintainability Measurement in Object-Oriented Systems

During maintenance, software systems undergo continuous correction and enhancement activities due to emerging faults, changing environments, evolving requirements, making this phase expensive time-consuming, often exceeding the initial development costs. To understand manage under maintenance better, several maintainability measures have been proposed. The Maintainability Index is commonly used as a quantitative measure of relative ease maintenance. There are variants that differ in factors affecting (e.g., code complexity, size, documentation) their given importance. explore how they compare when evaluating maintainability, an experiment was conducted with 45 Java-based object-oriented systems. results showed choice variant could influence perception maintainability. Although different presented values subjected same software, were strongly positively correlated generally indicated similarly evolved between releases over long term. Though, focusing on fine-grained posed by Index, selection had larger impact. Based characteristics, behavior, interrelationships, divided into two distinct clusters, i.e., do not consider comments calculation those do.