Quantifying Software Maintainability Based on a Fault-Detection/Correction Model

The software fault correction profiles play significant roles to assess the quality of software testing as well as to keep the good software maintenance activity. In this paper we develop a quantitative method to evaluate the software maintainability based on a stochastic model. The model proposed here is a queueing model with an infinite number of servers, and is related to the software fault- detection/correction profiles. Based on the familiar maximum likelihood estimation, we estimate quantitatively both the software reliability and maintainability with real project data, and refer to their applicability to the software maintenance practice.