A systematic review of software maintainability prediction and metrics

This paper presents the results of a systematic review conducted to collect evidence on software maintainability prediction and metrics. The study was targeted at the software quality attribute of maintainability as opposed to the process of software maintenance. The evidence was gathered from the selected studies against a set of meaningful and focused questions. 710 studies were initially retrieved; however of these only 15 studies were selected; their quality was assessed; data extraction was performed; and data was synthesized against the research questions. Our results suggest that there is little evidence on the effectiveness of software maintainability prediction techniques and models.