Correlation Analysis of Maintainability Index of Server-Side Script: PHP

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.