Using software maintainability models to track code health

Useful software usually changes over time. As code changes-for what ever reason-maintenance engineers most often attempt to keep the quality of it from degrading. But without means of measuring the quality or maintainability of the code, their efforts are dependent upon their expert knowledge to decide if the code is in “good” shape or if it needs reengineering. This paper describes mechanisms for automated software maintainability assessment and applies those techniques to industrial software systems. The results demonstrate how a metrics driven maintenance process can be used to prevent code degradation