MAINTAINABILITY PREDICTION FOR DATABASE-DRIVEN SOFTWARE APPLICATIONS - PRELIMINARY RESULTS FROM INTERVIEWS WITH SOFTWARE PROFESSIONALS

摘要

Software maintainability is an important software quality attribute and its prediction can greatly benefit the software industry in terms of cost and effort. Although the prediction of maintainability is important given its advantages, there is little published research on this topic which led to the need of collecting evidence on the state of practice. This research, and the hence the paper's contribution, aims at gathering evidence on the state of practice in software maintainability and its prediction. The paper presents the design, methodology, procedure of data analysis, and preliminary results from six interviews conducted with software professionals. The findings presented herein also provide the means to identify maintainability predictors from the practitioners' viewpoint. In addition, the reported factors also present a baseline for improving the maintainability of software applications in general and database-driven software applications in particular.