A Tool-Based Perspective on Software Code Maintainability Metrics: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Software maintainability is a crucial property of software projects. It can be defined as the ease with which a software system or component can be modified to be corrected, improved, or adapted to its environment. The software engineering literature proposes many models and metrics to predict the maintainability of a software project statically. However, there is no common accordance with the most dependable metrics or metric suites to evaluate such nonfunctional property. The goals of the present manuscript are as follows: (i) providing an overview of the most popular maintainability metrics according to the related literature; (ii) finding what tools are available to evaluate software maintainability; and (iii) linking the most popular metrics with the available tools and the most common programming languages. To this end, we performed a systematic literature review, following Kitchenham’s SLR guidelines, on the most relevant scientific digital libraries. The SLR outcome provided us with 174 software metrics, among which we identified a set of 15 most commonly mentioned ones, and 19 metric computation tools available to practitioners. We found optimal sets of at most five tools to cover all the most commonly mentioned metrics. The results also highlight missing tool coverage for some metrics on commonly used programming languages and minimal coverage of metrics for newer or less popular programming languages. We consider these results valuable for researchers and practitioners who want to find the best selection of tools to evaluate the maintainability of their projects or to bridge the discussed coverage gaps for newer programming languages.