An approach to assess maintainability change

Maintenance is a very expensive activity in the software systems' lifecycle. The ISO 25010 standard considers it as one of its main eight characteristics. In this paper, we propose an approach to assess the maintainability characteristic by its own subcharacteristics as defined by ISO 25010, using several object oriented metrics. A set of rules is defined to capture the influence of the metrics values over each subcharacteristic. The rules are then used in the maintainability change assessment process. A case study that uses two software versions is discussed in order to validate our approach.