Measuring Maintainability of Web Applications Using an Extensible MVC Architecture

Abstract

The recurrent usage of web-based applications has an important part in our daily life. MVC (Model View Controller) architecture is used as an alternative architectural style to encode the user interface. It divides the parts of a user interface into three components with clear roles. This makes applications easy to test and evolve. The maintainability of web applications plays a crucial role in satisfying end-users. In this paper, we try to enhance the maintainability of web applications using a new MVC architecture. Our architecture is an extension of this architectural style. To improve maintainability, several metrics have been used such as complexity and coupling. This paper presents a methodical refinement and mapping of the maintainability to a set of metrics for good design. Our research is evaluated through an empirical study that shows the difference in maintainability between a web application that practices the traditional MVC architecture and the same one that uses our new architecture.