A generic methodology for early identification of non-maintainable source code components through analysis of software releases

Abstract

Abstract Context Contemporary development approaches consider that time-to-market is of utmost importance and assume that software projects are constantly evolving, driven by the continuously changing requirements of end-users. This practically requires an iterative process where software is changing by introducing new or updating existing software/user features, while at the same time continuing to support the stable ones. In order to ensure efficient software evolution, the need to produce maintainable software is evident. Objective In this work, we argue that non-maintainable software is not the outcome of a single change, but the consequence of a series of changes throughout the development lifecycle. To that end, we define a maintainability evaluation methodology across releases and employ various information residing in software repositories, so as to decide on the maintainability of software. Method Upon using the dropping of packages as a non-maintainability indicator (accompanied by a series of quality-related criteria), the proposed methodology involves using one-class-classification techniques for evaluating maintainability at a package level, on four different axes each targeting a primary source code property: complexity, cohesion, coupling, and inheritance. Results Given the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of our methodology, we argue that apart from providing accurate and interpretable maintainability evaluation at package level, we can also identify non-maintainable components at an early stage. This early stage is in many cases around 50% of the software package lifecycle. Conclusion Based on our findings, we conclude that modeling the trending behavior of certain static analysis metrics enables the effective identification of non-maintainable software components and thus can be a valuable tool for the software engineers.