Abstract:
The maintainability of any software system is
quantified in terms of Maintainability Index
(MI). Many research papers used MI as
Maintainability indicator to validate and predict
the maintainability of their proposed metrics. In
this study the maintainability change of the PHP
language was empirically investigated. The
research performed on 210 PHP source codes
from different domains to compute a
maintainability index of each file. The
correlations between each parameter for
Maintainability Index (MI) with the other
parameters and with the MI itself are calculated.
The parameters of MI are Line of Code (LOC),
Cyclomatic Complexity (CC), and Halstead
Volume (HV). The relationship between
maintainability index and metrics taken for the
study was identified on the basis of the Pearson
correlation analysis. From the results it can be
depicted that the Line of Code (LOC),
Cyclomatic Complexity (CC), and Halstead
Volume (HV) are strongly inversely related to the maintainability index of PHP.
