An Activity-Based Quality Model for Maintainability
This addresses the problem of managing maintainability for software developers and engineers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing quality models by explicitly incorporating maintenance activities.
The paper tackles the lack of a comprehensive basis for assessing software maintainability by proposing a 2-dimensional model that associates system properties with maintenance activities, transforming it into a structured quality knowledge base usable in industry, as demonstrated in a case study on Matlab Simulink models.
Maintainability is a key quality attribute of successful software systems. However, its management in practice is still problematic. Currently, there is no comprehensive basis for assessing and improving the maintainability of software systems. Quality models have been proposed to solve this problem. Nevertheless, existing approaches do not explicitly take into account the maintenance activities, that largely determine the software maintenance effort. This paper proposes a 2-dimensional model of maintainability that explicitly associates system properties with the activities carried out during maintenance. The separation of activities and properties facilitates the identification of sound quality criteria and allows to reason about their interdependencies. This transforms the quality model into a structured and comprehensive quality knowledge base that is usable in industrial project environments. For example, review guidelines can be generated from it. The model is based on an explicit quality metamodel that supports its systematic construction and fosters preciseness as well as completeness. An industrial case study demonstrates the applicability of the model for the evaluation of the maintainability of Matlab Simulink models that are frequently used in model-based development of embedded systems.