Measuring for database programs maintainability

Abstract

Nowadays, relational databases are introduced in most of the Information Systems, becoming their essential core. The relational database language, SQL, is being increasingly used for application development. Software engineers have been putting forward huge quantities of measures for software products, processes and resources. Unfortunately, almost all the measures proposed until now, have focused on 3GL program characteristics disregarding databases and their associated languages. Only a few author have proposed some metrics for 4GL effort estimation. In this article we describe three simple measures for assessing SQL code maintainability. Both an experiment with students and a real case in a state owned organization have empirically validated these measures as maintainability indicators.