Vol 05, Article 01335; January 2014 International Journal of Engineering Sciences Research-IJESR http://ijesr.in/ ISSN: 2230-8504; e-ISSN-2230-8512 2010-2014 - IJESR Indexing in Process - EMBASE, EmCARE, Electronics & Communication Abstracts, SCIRUS, SPARC, GOOGLE Database, EBSCO, NewJour, Worldcat, DOAJ, and other major databases etc., 1485 A Report on the Analysis of Software Maintenance and Impact on Quality Factors C.MALLIKARJUNA 1 , K. SUDHEER BABU 2 , P. CHITTI BABU 3 1 Assistant Professor, APGCCS, Rajampet, Kadapa, AndhraPradesh 2 Assistant Professor, APGCCS, Rajampet, Kadapa, AndhraPradesh 3 Professor, APGCCS, Rajampet, Kadapa, AndhraPradesh 1 malli.chindukuri@gmail.com, 2 kotasudheerbabu@gmail.com, 3 pcb_mca@yahoo.com ABSTRACT Computer Scientists are continually attempting to improve the software system development. Systems are developed in top-down fashion for better modularity and understand ability. Performance enhancements are implemented for more speed. In current era, the unique area in which a great deal of effort is being devoted is software maintenance. It is estimated that more than 50 percent of development cost of a software system is devoted to maintenance. Today in Industries Software Maintenance is playing a key role in software development process. If the software which is developed doesn’t have quality in terms of dynamic user requirements then the blame goes to maintenance phase in the SDLC. So, proper maintenance is required to govern different quality factors in a right way. Perhaps good knowledge of software maintenance and its impact on quality factors needed to be understood by the maintainers before they start their job. In this paper we are giving a detailed study on Software Maintenance and its impact on software Quality factors or attributes like reliability, reusability, and portability. Keywords: Software Maintenance, Software Portability, Software Reusability, Quality Attributes. 1. INTRODUCTION In this paper we have performed a detailed study about the impact of software maintenance on software quality factors. Before approaching this, one must have a better knowledge about different stages or phases of software development life cycle and the actions which are taken in each phase as a prerequisite. So here in the following first and second subsequent sections we present the brief information about software maintenance process and its effects on quality factors. Finally in the last section we discussed the study of impact on quality factors through maintenance. 2. SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE Maintainability is the ability of the system to undergo changes with a degree of ease. These changes could impact components, services, features, and interfaces when adding or changing the application’s functionality in order to fix errors, or to meet new business requirements. Maintainability can also affect the time it takes to restore the system to its operational status following a failure or removal from operation for an upgrade. Improving system maintainability can increase availability and reduce the effects of run-time defects. An application’s maintainability is often a function of its overall quality attributes but there a number of key issues that can directly affect maintainability 2.1 Maintenance Process The modification has become a complex and costly process, which is large and complex software system could be delivered with undiscovered flow. Therefore, several tasks are considered in order to achieve this process. Software maintenance as shows in figure 1 consists of four main tasks, understand, analyze, modify, and test the intended system. Fig 1. Software Maintenance Process