MAINTAINABILITY PREDICTORS FOR RELATIONAL DATABASE-DRIVEN SOFTWARE APPLICATIONS: EXTENDED RESULTS FROM A SURVEY

Software maintainability is a very important quality attribute. Its prediction for relational database-driven software applications can help organizations improve the maintainability of these applications. The research presented herein adopts a survey-based approach where a survey was conducted with 40 software professionals aimed at identifying and ranking the important maintainability predictors for relational database-driven software applications. The survey results were analyzed using frequency analysis. The results suggest that maintainability prediction for relational database-driven applications is not the same as that of traditional software applications in terms of the importance of the predictors used for this purpose. The results also provide a baseline for creating maintainability prediction models for relational database-driven software applications.