Maintainability

The maintainability (English maintainability, supportability or serviceability ) software is a criterion in the development of software and displays, with what energy and what success changes can be carried out in a context of system applications.

Maintainability is more important

• The greater the duration of intended use of the software
• The lower the availability of experts in the subject area

Important criteria for the maintainability of the software are:

• The documentation, especially the exact specification of interfaces ( interfaces)
• A modular, highly articulated structure ( decomposition into elementary, individually testable units)
• The absence of jump instructions ( "GOTO " commands )
• The local comprehensibility of instructions
• The avoidance of global variables
• Parametrizability of functions or methods
• Incorporated into the Program tests the assumptions that the programmer has about program states (assertions )
• The largest possible size of the automatically executable tests for the system
• The use of well-known and recognized design patterns

The maintainability is one of the criteria that determine the development of programming languages.

To determine the maintainability McCabe and Halstead metrics of the maintainability index (English Maintainability Index ) is based on -line metrics calculated.