A comparative study of MI tools: Defining the Roadmap to MI tools standardization

Software maintainability has always been a significant factor in the success or failure of any software product. There are numerous ways to calculate software maintainability but none of them has been able to grab as much industrial acceptance as the maintainability index (MI). MI can be calculated with the help of various tools, however selection of an appropriate tool for specific application is a critical research issue. This indicates that there is a dire need to clearly identify behavior of MI tools used for calculating software maintainability for various software source code scenarios. For this purpose we have analyzed behaviors of various MI tools with different MI parameters using a variety of test scenarios. We have developed a set of benchmark MI parameters test-cases for available MI tools to compare their results on the basis of features they support. We then executed the test scenarios on selected proprietary and open-source MI tools and evaluated their strengths and weaknesses on the basis of test results. The results highlighted weaknesses of some of the MI tools and helped us in making recommendations for selection of appropriate tool for specific application having better ability to determine the maintainability of the software system in terms of ldquomaintainability indexrdquo.