An empirical analysis of the impact of software development problem factors on software maintainability

Many problem factors in the software development phase affect the maintainability of the delivered software systems. Therefore, understanding software development problem factors can help in not only reducing the incidence of project failure but can also ensure software maintainability. This study focuses on those software development problem factors which may possibly affect software maintainability. Twenty-five problem factors were classified into five dimensions; a questionnaire was designed and 137 software projects were surveyed. A K-means cluster analysis was performed to classify the projects into three groups of low, medium and high maintainability projects. For projects which had a higher level of severity of problem factors, the influence on software maintainability becomes more obvious. The influence of software process improvement (SPI) on project problems and the associated software maintainability was also examined in this study. Results suggest that SPI can help reduce the level of severity of the documentation quality and process management problems, and is only likely to enhance software maintainability to a medium level. Finally, the top 10 list of higher-severity software development problem factors was identified, and implications were discussed.