Applying Maintainability Oriented Software Metrics to Cabin Software of a Commercial Airliner

Airplane manufacturers are under an increasing pressure to integrate new hardware into the cabin of their planes. Clearly, this comes along with a need for changing and extending the attached software platforms as well. Anecdotally, these systems have often been criticized as hard to maintain. However, in practice there exists no scientifically sound analysis of their maintainability so far. As a first step towards such an analysis, we present the results of applying common software metrics on the cabin software of a current commercial passenger airplane in this paper and discuss their implications for its maintainability.