Assessment of Software Maintainability Evolution Using C&K Metrics

Assessing the software maintainability quickly and early can generate earnings in many levels of the project as they can run, as soon as possible, preventive or corrective actions in their planning, for example, so that valuable resources are preserved or applied in more specific areas or in later stages. The objective of this work, based on a case study is to evaluate the maintainability of specific software, through statistical analysis of values of the metrics proposed by Chidamber & Kemerer (C&K). The method used in this work needs mounting of computing environments containing different versions of the software source code, to support the collection the values of the metrics that will serve as a source for statistical analysis of data obtained. The greater contribution is in this case, investigate the relationship between C&K metrics and maintainability, identifying possible trends of software maintainability through statistical analysis, based on the metrics values obtained through different and subsequent Java source code versions.