A study of the effects of software development practices on software maintenance effort

Many maintenance problems derive from inadequate software development practices. Poor design choices result in complex software that may be costly to support and difficult to change. A general framework based upon software complexity is proposed that could be used to assess the potential maintenance impact of development tools and techniques. To test the framework, a study was conducted in two commercial organizations. The results indicate that reduced maintenance effort is associated with development practices, including structured programming, report generators and packaged software. A surprising finding is that use of a software code generator is associated with increased maintenance effort.