QUPER-MAn: Benchmark-Guided Target Setting for Maintainability Requirements

TL;DR

This paper introduces QUPER-MAn, a benchmark-guided model for setting maintainability targets in requirements engineering, aiming to improve maintainability management in software development.

Contribution

It presents a novel maintainability adaptation of the QUPER model, integrating benchmarks to facilitate informed target setting in requirements engineering.

Findings

Maintainability is often overlooked in industry practices.

Tools for maintainability are mainly used implicitly.

QUPER-MAn can help organizations actively manage maintainability.

Abstract

Maintainable source code is essential for sustainable development in any software organization. Unfortunately, many studies show that maintainability often receives less attention than its importance warrants. We argue that requirements engineering can address this gap the problem by fostering discussions and setting appropriate targets in a responsible manner. In this preliminary work, we conducted an exploratory study of industry practices related to requirements engineering for maintainability. Our findings confirm previous studies: maintainability remains a second-class quality concern. Explicit requirements often make sweeping references to coding conventions. Tools providing maintainability proxies are common but typically only used in implicit requirements related to engineering practices. To address this, we propose QUPER-MAn, a maintainability adaption of the QUPER model, which was originally developed to help organizations set targets for performance requirements. Developed using a design science approach, QUPER-MAn, integrates maintainability benchmarks and supports target setting. We posit that it can shift maintainability from an overlooked development consequence to an actively managed goal driven by informed and responsible engineering decisions.