International Journal of Computer Science Engineering and Information Technology Research (IJCSEITR) ISSN 2249-6831 Vol. 3, Issue 3, Aug 2013, 29-42 © TJPRC Pvt. Ltd. ASSESSMENT OF MAINTAINABILITY FACTOR P. CHITTI BABU 1 & K. C. K. BHARATHI 2 1 Professor, Department of MCA, APGCCS, Andhra Pradesh, India 2 Assistant Professor, Department of MCA, AITS, Andhra Pradesh, India ABSTRACT The challenge of research in software quality is to provide tools and technology that will enable the software industry to deploy software products and services that are safe, dependable, and usable with in an economic framework. This paper involves a study of the maintainability factor. It is hoped that, this took whom integrated into the development environment will be of great help to the developers to monitor their coding style and also to evolve a product of good maintainability. KEYWORDS: Maintainability, Software Quality, Cyclomatic Complexity INTRODUCTION According to [PRESSMAN92], the effort required to locate and fix an error in a program is an indication of the maintainability of the program. To do this, the program must be easily understandable. So, a program‟s maintainability is nothing but its understandability. Historically, the term „maintenance‟ has been applied to the process of modifying a program after it has been delivered and is in use. These modifications may involve simple changes to correct coding errors, more extensive changes to correct design errors or drastic rewrites to correct specification errors or accommodate new requirements. Traditionally, maintenance of software accounts for a large portion of the cost in the software development life cycle. Maintenance is related to module size and complexity with larger and more complex modules typically requiring more maintenance. Consequently, maintainability metric usually incorporates a complexity measurement in its calculation Maintainability is affected by data structures, logical structures, documentation, diagnostic tools, and by personnel attributes such as specialization, experience, training, intelligence, and motivation. Maintainability will be improved by the following methods:  Inspections  Automated audits of comments  Test path analysis programs  Use of pseudo code documentation  Dual maintenance of source code  Modularity  Structured program logic flow