Towards a Benchmark for the Maintainability Evolution of Industrial Software Systems

The maintainability of software is an important cost factor for organizations across all industries, as maintenance makes up approximately 40% to 70% of the total development costs of a software system. Organizations are often stuck in the situation where software maintenance costs dominate IT budgets, leaving no room for enhancement and innovation. Building a benchmark for maintainability evolution is helpful in this context because it can help organizations decide on software improvement or replacement strategies. The prototype benchmark we study in this paper shows that software volume and maintainability levels are strong determinants of future maintainability evolution rates. We further describe the data collection and cleaning procedures that were applied to approximately 1,750 industrial software systems, and we provide an exploratory analysis of the resulting benchmark dataset.