A roadmap for software maintainability measurement

Abstract

Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) is one of the most used programming paradigms. Thus, researches dedicated in improvement of software quality that adhere to this paradigm are demanded. Complementarily, maintainability is considered a software attribute that plays an important role in its quality level. In this context, Object-Oriented Software Maintainability (OOSM) has been studied through years and several researchers proposed a high number of metrics to measure it. Nevertheless, there is no standardization or a catalogue to summarize all the information about these metrics, helping the researchers to make decision about which metrics can be adopted to perform their experiments in OOSM. Actually, distinct areas in both academic and industrial environment, such as Software Development, Project Management, and Software Research can adopt them to support decision-making processes. Thus, this work researched about the usage of OOSM metrics in academia and industry in order to help researchers in making decision about the metrics suite to be adopted. We found 570 OOSM metrics. Additionally, as a preliminary result we proposed a catalog with 36 metrics that were most used in academic works/experiments, trying to guide researchers with their decision-make about which metrics are more indicated to be adopted in their experiments.