An Activity-Based Quality Model for Maintainability

TL;DR

This paper introduces a two-dimensional quality model for software maintainability that links system properties with maintenance activities, enabling better assessment and improvement in industrial contexts.

Contribution

It presents a novel activity-based maintainability model explicitly associating system properties with maintenance activities, enhancing assessment and decision-making.

Findings

Model effectively evaluates Matlab Simulink models' maintainability.

Supports generation of review guidelines from the quality knowledge base.

Demonstrates practical applicability in industrial environments.

Abstract

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.