Improving Software Maintainability through Risk Analysis

The lifetime of a product is dependent on its maintainability. It is proved that a lot of cost spent towards maintainability. Researchers find it as a difficult task to measure and improve software maintainability. Here we proposed a risk based approach to improve software maintainability. Risk based approach accounts the probability of failure of a portion of code as determined by its complexity. Four products with different functionalities are taken into consideration and its risk prone areas in the code are identified. A set of six metrics with its threshold values are used to locate the highly risked areas of a code. Suitable changes are recommended to these highly risked codes to improve software maintainability.