Software complexity and maintainability

Materiel systems also include, but are not limited to, standalone or embedded automatic data pro. Measuring software maintainability is nontrivial and there exists no single metric to measure it accurately. Software maintainability means the ease with which these operations can be carried out. In 24, proposed model considered the different design characteristics and this model pointed out that maintainability is a measure of software characteristics as source. Designing dataintensive applications maintainability. Models are proposed for estimating the economic impacts of. It differs from hardware reliability in that it reflects the design perfection, rather than manufacturing perfection. Developing maintainable software software sustainability.

Wmfp automatically measures the complexity of existing source code. Software maintainability is important because it is approximately 75% of the cost related to a project. Modeling designcoding factors that drive maintainability. Technical debt haunts developers and the longer it takes, the more interest rates accrue over this debt. Cyclomatic complexity is a software metric used to indicate the complexity of a program. Software complexity is the measure of how difficult the pl ogram is to comprehend and work with. Code metrics is a set of software measures that provide developers better insight into the code they are developing. Comparative study of the factors that affect maintainability.

The algorithm then produces several complexity metrics from these micro functions, before interpolating the results into a single score. The increased complexity of modern software applications also increases the difficulty of making the code reliable and maintainable. Maintainability is a multifaceted quality attribute each of the facets must be analyzed to objectively measure it. It is a quantitative measure of the number of linearly independent paths through a programs source code. Maintainability refers to the ease with which you can repair, improve and understand software code. In software programming, as the design of software is realized, the number of elements and their interconnections gradually emerge to be huge, which becomes too difficult to understand at once. In 1991 oman and hagemeister introduced a composite metric for quantifying software maintainability. The maintainability index is calculated as a factored formula consisting of sloc source lines of code, cyclomatic complexity and halstead volume. Maintainability is an estimate of technical debt in the repo based on a standardized 10point assessment of duplication, cyclomatic complexity, cognitive complexity, and structural issues for every technical debt issue we identify during our 10point inspection, we estimate a.

Proceedings of the tenth international conference on information systemsdecember 1989 pages 247255. Ability of a computer program to be retained in its original form, and to be restored to that form in case of a failure. Instead, one can measure maintenance process attributes, such as. According to several commentators, there is a distinction between the terms complex and complicated. Reducing complexity improves maintainability of software. Software maintenance is an expensive activity that consumes a major portion of the cost of the total project. However, existing definitions of maintainability, such as the halstead volume, mccabes cyclomatic complexity or the sei maintainability index provide a very poor understanding of what maintainability is how it.

Software that is written without maintainability in mind requires about four times as much effort to maintain than it did to develop. Software maintainability free demo video explanation. In general, maintainability index relies on many factors. Explosion of state space, tight coupling, spaghetti of dependencies, inconsistent coding standards such as naming and terminology, hacking in performance improvements, code to handle one off edge cases sprinkled throughout. For every technical debt issue we identify during our 10point inspection, we estimate a rough time it would t. Introduction software maintainability is the degree to which characteristics that impede software maintenance are present. This paper discusses a number of software complexity metrics reported in the last few years and examines the applicability of these complexity metrics to form a software maintainability point of view. Volume hv metric 2, the cyclomatic complexity cc 3 metric, the average number of lines of code. Measures of software complexity have been developed since the 1970s in an attempt to quantify the internal working of a software system rather than rely on a software developers subjective opinion. This metric is a modern software sizing algorithm that parses source code and breaks it down into micro functions. Reliability, availability, and maintainability ram are three system attributes that are of tremendous interest to systems engineers, logisticians, and users. Materiel systems also include but are not limited to standalone or embedded automatic data pro. Software complexity and maintainability proceedings of the tenth. Various activities carried out during maintenance include the addition of new features, deletion of obsolete code, correction of errors, etc.

The cyclomatic complexity is more in the classesmethods where there are a lot of conditional operators e. This maintainability index mi has evolved into numerous variants and has been successfully applied to a number of. Because of increases in the size and complexity of software products, software maintenance tasks have become increasingly more difficult. This paper discusses the results of allocated to each subsystem based on their complexity and reliability and maintainability reallocations made for the gsdo subsystems as the program nears the end of its design phase. Assessing and modeling the effects of design and coding factors on software system maintainability can help provide heuristics to human designers and programmers to reduce maintenance costs and improve quality. Software maintainability is defined as the ease with which a software system or a component can be modified, to correct faults, improve performance or other attributes, or adapt to a changed. Closely related concepts in the software engineering domain are evolvability, modifiability, technical debt, and code smells. Maintainability is defined as the ease with which a system can be maintained. Computes a score of how maintainable a program is, based on a combination of cyclomatic complexity, halstead volume, normalized by the number of lines of. Software maintenance is a phase in the software development cycle that starts after the customer has received the product. The idea of linking software complexity to the maintainability of the software has. Software design for maintainability establish design criteria for maintainable software products to increase system availability and decrease overall development and operating costs benefits by designing software products that are maintainable we can update and enhance fielded software much faster and at lower cost. Software reliability is also an important factor affecting system reliability. This document is a first step towards the construction of a maintainability prediction model.

Does it make sense to compute cyclomatic complexitylines. Banker carlson school of management university of minnesota srikant m. For this reason, many applications are replaced simply because the overhead to modify them becomes prohibitive. How to effectively define and measure maintainability. In software engineering, these activities are known as software maintenance cf. Manageabilityhow efficiently and easily a software system can be monitored and maintained to keep the system performing, secure, and running smoothly. Maintainability and flexibility at the software level are of predominant importance to drive innovation at the business process level. Maintainability testing is not the same as maintenance testing which is testing software that has been modified. The maintainability index is calculated with certain formulae from linesofcode measures, mccabe measures and halstead complexity measures. It is an internal attribute of the system which cannot be measured directly. Software design for maintainability, page 1 of 6 technique dfe6 page dfe23 technique apply maintainability concepts to development of software in the early. Maintainability index maintainability index is a software metric which measures how maintainable easy to support and change the source code is. Abstractsoftware metrics is one of the wellknown topics of research in software.

Regression testing has been widely used during software evolution to ensure that software changes do not bring new regression faults. With multiple system interfaces and complex requirements, the complexity of software systems sometimes grows beyond control, rendering applications and portfolios overly costly to maintain and risky to enhance. Tmde requirements will be coordinated with the executive director, tmde activity. Software reliability is the probability of failurefree software operation for a specified period of time in a specified environment.

This paper examines the relationships between software complexity and software maintainability in commercial software environments. Code is passed to escomplex in the form of syntax trees that have been generated with esprima, the popular javascript parser. Calculate code metrics visual studio microsoft docs. A measure of effort must include time, resources and expertise. Does it make sense to compute cyclomatic complexitylines of. Bioinspired information and communications technologies, 2014. It identifies a set of software measures based on correlations published in empirical studies. Reliability, availability, and maintainability sebok. It differs from hardware reliability in that it reflects the design. What is more, the software complexity of a given system is one of the main longterm legacies of whatever tools and techniques were employed in its initial development. The complexity is one of the major factors to control the maintainability of software, as more complex software is difficult to edit and test resulting low software quality 3, 4.

This paper presents an analysis by which testerdeveloper. As a system is developed, it is likely that the number of entities will grow, and with this the number of interactions between those entities. Developing maintainable software helps reduce technical debt. This will ensure maximum use of items available to the army. Comparative study of the software metrics for the complexity and. It is costeffective for software practitioners to monitor and control quality of software systems from the early phases of development.

Software maintainability index revisited researchgate. Collectively, they affect economic lifecycle costs of a system and its utility. The focus of this study is to evaluate software maintainability. A robust software complexity measurement program provides an organization with the opportunity to. Programming complexity or software complexity is a term that includes many properties of a piece of software, all of which affect internal interactions. By identifying and correcting the problem areas earlier, youre able to improve the security, reliability, and maintainability of your software. The quality checks and software metrics produced by imagix 4d enable you to identify potential problems during the development and testing of your source code.

Software complexity is closely related with modularity, information hiding, coupling and cohesion. Measures the number of linearlyindependent paths through a program module control flow. Essentially, with cyclomatic complexity, higher numbers are bad and lower numbers are good. Datar dani zweig graduate school of industrial administration carnegie mellon university abstract this paper examines the relationships between software complexity and software maintainability in. The mccabe complexity is one of the more widelyaccepted software metrics, it is intended to be independent of language and language format. The cyclomatic complexity also affects other software metrics, like code maintainability index. Development teams can identify potential risks, understand the current state of a project, and track progress during software development. Chug, application of evolutionary algorithms for software maintainability prediction using objectoriented metric, in 8th int. In software development, complexity refers to the nature and number of interactions between entities within a system, rather than to the complexity of the task that the system performs. For example, in visual studio, it rely on cyclomatic complexity, depth of inheritance, class coupling and lines of. Chug, software maintainability prediction using machine learning algorithms, softw. Pdf software complexity and maintainability researchgate. The term complexity stands for state of events or things, which have multiple interconnected links and highly complicated structures.

For example, in visual studio, it rely on cyclomatic complexity, depth of inheritance, class coupling and lines of code. As the project grows and technology evolves, complexity and the list of issues grow. Maintainability can be either a static form of testing, i. Software maintainability 3, is the degree to which characteristics that hamper software maintenance are present and determined by software complexity. Models are proposed for estimating the economic impacts of software complexity and for identifying the factors which affect a systems complexity. The mccabe complexity is one of the more widelyaccepted software metrics, it is intended to be. The cyclomatic complexity vg has been introduced by thomas mccabe in 1976.

In more extreme cases, it can make modifying the software virtually impossible. Maintainability is an estimate of technical debt in the repo based on a standardized 10point assessment of duplication, cyclomatic complexity, cognitive complexity, and structural issues. Unlike cyclomatic complexity and halstead volume, the. Developers can use visual studio to generate code metrics data that measure the complexity and maintainability of their managed code. Software maintenance in software engineering is the modification of a software product after delivery to correct faults, to improve performance or other attributes. Software complexity is a natural byproduct of the functional complexity that the code is attempting to enable. Although crucial, regression testing can be extremely costly. This is why future maintainability should be at the top of developers minds when architecting and developing software applications. Software maintainability is defined as the degree to which an application is understood, repaired, or enhanced. The importance of maintaining software updates the main benefits of maintaining software updates are that security remains on point, usability is firing on all cylinders, and your software is compatible with other all the software you use. According to the ieee, software maintainability is defined as 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.

In 24, proposed model considered the different design characteristics and this model pointed out that maintainability is a measure of. Code metrics data can be generated for an entire solution or a single. Modern software systems keep evolving to refine software functionality and maintainability, as well as fixing software flaws. In general any software development manager is familiar with this definition of effort as it applies to creating software. Increased software complexity means that maintenance and enhancement projects will take longer, will cost more, and will result in more errors. Citeseerx document details isaac councill, lee giles, pradeep teregowda.