Using Metrics for Estimating Maintainability of Web Applications: An Empirical Study

Software maintenance is a very expensive activity in software life cycle. As in conventional systems, Web-based applications also needs a considerable cost of maintenance efforts and in general the more cost because of their inherent complex architecture. To estimate the maintainability cost of software, many software metrics have been proposed. This paper presents the result of an experimental study to explore the relationship between maintainability and some typical software metrics. We have collected time really spent for maintenance activity for Web-based applications. In the experimental study, we have found that for web-based systems, the existing metrics may not be indicators to maintenance effort on the contrary to conventional systems.