Methodology for maintainability-based risk assessment

A software product spends more than 65% of its lifecycle in maintenance. Software systems with good maintainability can be easily modified to fix faults or to adapt to changing environment. We define maintainability-based risk as a product of two factors: the probability of performing maintenance tasks and the impact of performing these tasks. In this paper, we present a methodology for assessing maintainability-based risk to account for changes in the system requirements. The proposed methodology depends on the architectural artifacts and their evolution through the life cycle of the system. We illustrate the methodology on a case study using UML models