Maintainability
Encyclopedia
In engineering
, maintainability is the ease with which a product can be maintained in order to:
In some cases, maintainability involves a system of continuous improvement - learning from the past in order to improve the ability to maintain systems, or improve reliability of systems based on maintenance experience.
In telecommunication
and several other engineering fields, the term maintainability has the following meanings:
, these activities are known as software maintenance
(cf. ISO/IEC 9126).
The maintainability index is calculated with certain formulae from lines-of-code measures, McCabe measures and Halstead complexity measures
.
The measurement and track maintainability are intended to help reduce or reverse a system's tendency toward "code entropy" or degraded integrity, and to indicate when it becomes cheaper and/or less risky to rewrite the code than it is to change it.
Engineering
Engineering is the discipline, art, skill and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, mathematical, economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design and build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes that safely realize improvements to the lives of...
, maintainability is the ease with which a product can be maintained in order to:
- isolate defects or their cause
- correct defects or their cause
- meet new requirements
- make future maintenance easier, or
- cope with a changed environment
In some cases, maintainability involves a system of continuous improvement - learning from the past in order to improve the ability to maintain systems, or improve reliability of systems based on maintenance experience.
In telecommunication
Telecommunication
Telecommunication is the transmission of information over significant distances to communicate. In earlier times, telecommunications involved the use of visual signals, such as beacons, smoke signals, semaphore telegraphs, signal flags, and optical heliographs, or audio messages via coded...
and several other engineering fields, the term maintainability has the following meanings:
- A characteristic of design and installation, expressed as the probability that an item will be retained in or restored to a specified condition within a given period of timeTimeTime is a part of the measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify rates of change such as the motions of objects....
, when the maintenance is performed in accordance with prescribed procedures and resources. - The ease with which maintenance of a functional unit can be performed in accordance with prescribed requirements.
Software engineering
In software engineeringSoftware engineering
Software Engineering is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software, and the study of these approaches; that is, the application of engineering to software...
, these activities are known as software maintenance
Software maintenance
Software Maintenance in software engineering is the modification of a software product after delivery to correct faults, to improve performance or other attributes....
(cf. ISO/IEC 9126).
The maintainability index is calculated with certain formulae from lines-of-code measures, McCabe measures and Halstead complexity measures
Halstead complexity measures
Halstead complexity measures are software metrics introduced by Maurice Howard Halstead in 1977 as part of his treatise on establishing an empirical science of software development....
.
The measurement and track maintainability are intended to help reduce or reverse a system's tendency toward "code entropy" or degraded integrity, and to indicate when it becomes cheaper and/or less risky to rewrite the code than it is to change it.
See also
- List of system quality attributes
- Supportability (disambiguation)
- Serviceability (disambiguation)
- Software SizingSoftware SizingSoftware sizing is an activity in software engineering that is used to estimate the size of a software application or component in order to be able to implement other software project management activities...
Further reading
- Blanchard S. B., Maintainability: A Key to Effective Serviceability and Maintenance Management, John Wiley & Sons Inc., NewYork 1995
- Ebeling C. E., An Introduction to Reliability and Maintainability Engineering, McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., Boston 1997.
- Patton J. D., Maintanability and Maintenance Management, Instrument Society of America, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 1988.