Fixing vulnerabilities potentially hinders maintainability

Security is a requirement of utmost importance to produce high-quality software. However, there still considerable amount vulnerabilities being discovered and fixed almost weekly. We hypothesize that developers affect the maintainability their codebases when patching vulnerabilities. This paper evaluates impact patches improve security on open-source Maintainability measured based Better Code Hub’s model 10 guidelines dataset, including 1300 security-related commits. Results show evidence trade-off between for 41.90% cases, i.e., may hinder software maintainability. Our analysis shows 38.29% increased complexity 37.87% percentage LOCs per unit. The implications our study are changes while need be performed with extra care; tools patch risk assessment should integrate into CI/CD pipeline; computer science curricula needs updated; and, more secure programming languages necessary.