Measuring Maintainability Index of a Software Depending on Line of Code Only

Abstract

Maintainability Index (MI) has been proposed to calculate a single number that expresses the maintainability of a system. MI is calculated as a factored formula consisting of Lines of Code (LOC), Cyclomatic Complexity (CC)and Halstead Volume (HV). In this paper, we present a new method to find MI with respect to LOC only. To validate the method Measuring Maintainability Index Software (MMIS) is developed, that first finds MI with respect to (LOC, CC, and HV); secondly find MI with respect to LOC only. As the result has been compared they were closed but the new method was easy to understand, fast to count, and independent on the program language. In addition to many well-known programs, the MMIS was used to test itself and the result demonstrates that the program used to calculate MI value with respect to LOC only tend to be maintainable while the lexical analyzer the major step in calculating MI with regard to (LOC, HV, CC) is difficult to maintain.