Correlation of Object-Oriented Design Metrics with Maintainability

Abstract

Software maintainability prediction enables organizations to predict the maintainability of the software systems and can then help in reducing the maintenance effort and thus, reducing the overall cost and time spent on a software project. Besides, measuring structural design properties of a software system, such as coupling, cohesion, or complexity, is a promising approach towards early quality assessments. To use such measurement effectively, quality models are needed that quantitatively describe how these internal structural properties relate to relevant external system qualities such as reliability or maintainability. In this paper, although the framework of design prediction approach is proposed which consists of two main phases, we only focus on a set of object-oriented design metrics that can be used to evaluate and correlate object- oriented design maintainability.