Model Driven Software Development (MDSD) has matured over the last few years and is now becoming an established technology. One advantage that is promoted by the MDSD community is the improved maintainability during the systems evolution over conventional development approaches. Compared to code-based development (meta-)models and transformations need to be handled differently when it comes to ...

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...

Architecture-based metrics can provide valuable information on whether or not one can localize the effects of modification (such as adjusting data flows or control flows) in software and can therefore be used to prevent the changes from adversely affecting other software components. This paper proposes an architecture-centric metric using entropy for assessing structural dependencies among soft...

Model-driven Engineering (MDE) approaches often present themselves as a solution to palliate the complexity of software maintainability tasks. However, there is no empirical evidence of their benefits and limitations with respect to code-based maintainability practices. To fill this gap, this paper illustrates the results of an empirical study, involving 44 subjects, in which we compared an MDE...

Code smells are indicators of software design shortcomings that can decrease software maintainability. An advantage of code smells over traditional software measures is that the former are associated with an explicit set of refactoring strategies to improve the existing design. As such, code smell analysis is a promising approach to address both the assessment and the improvement of maintainabi...

According to IEEE Standard Glossary of Software Engineering Terminology: maintainability is the ease with which a software system or component can be modified to correct faults, improve performance or other attributes, or adapt to a changed environment. [1]. Maintainability can also be defined as the probability that a specified maintenance action on a specified item can be successfully perform...

One of the main cost of maintenance is continual retesting. Testing will be characterized as the construction of pathways that reach from inputs to some interesting zone of a program. This zone could be a bug or a desired feature. In this reachability view, the goal of testing is to show that a test set uncovers no bugs while reaching all desired features. A system is hard to maintain if it is ...

In this position paper, we describe the research we have just initiated. We will investigate how the “maintainability” of a piece of software changes as time passes and it is being maintained by performing measurements on industrial systems. We present the notion of “maintainability”, our hypotheses, and our approach.