A probabilistic quality model for C# -an industrial case study

Abstract

Both for software developers and managers it is crucial to have clues about different aspects of the quality of their systems. Maintainability is probably the most attractive, observed and evaluated quality characteristic of all. The importance of maintainability lies in its very obvious and direct connection with the costs of altering the behavior of the software. In this paper we present an existing approach and its adaptation to the C# language for estimating the maintainability of the source code. We used our model to assess the maintainability of the C# components of a large inter-national company. We analyzed almost a million lines of code and evaluated the results with the help of IT professionals of our industrial partner. The application of our method and model was successful as the opinions of the developers showed a 0.92 correlation with the maintainability values produced by our C# maintainability model.