Factors Influencing Software Maintainability Prediction Using Soft Computing

Software maintainability plays a vital role, as in the present scenario the customer requirement is changing more rapidly. For effective utilization of software, maintainability seems to be an essential factor and needs to be taken care at a top priority. Effective utilization of soft computing techniques will definitely lower maintenance time and cost. In past, several researchers have developed a number of models to estimate maintainability using various factors. In this paper, our focus is to find out the factors that contribute towards software maintainability at a larger level. It is clear from related work the software maintainability metrics proposed by Li and Henry, Metrics, Maintainability Metrics, and Chidamber and Kermerer Metrics were widely used by various researchers to predict software maintainability using soft computing techniques and results are found to be satisfactory. Moreover, A detailed classification has been presented in this paper and we came up with the factors affecting software maintainability for the object-oriented system along with the comparison of various models, especially focusing on input attributes and performance measures, widely used to predict software maintainability using soft computing. Besides this, we have also proposed a General Software Maintainability Process Model.