Towards Predicting Maintainability for Relational Database-Driven Software Applications: Extended Evidence from Software Practitioners

The accurate maintainability prediction of relational database-driven software applications can improve the management of projects relating to these applications, thus benefitting software organisations. This paper gives an up-to-date account of the state of practice in maintainability prediction for relational database-driven software applications and provides a baseline for conducting further research in this area. The research involved conducting twelve semi-structured interviews with software professionals, which were then analysed using content analysis with the help of NVivo. The results provide both an account of the current state of practice in that area and also a list of potential maintainability predictors for relational database-driven software applications. These predictors relate to database schema, front-end application, and the interaction of database schema with the front-end application. These results provide the basis for further work involving the proposal and empirical validation of maintainability prediction models for relational database-driven software applications.