The Software Test Engineer's Handbook, 2nd Edition, 2nd Edition

20 Maintainability Testing

Poor old maintainability, always relegated toward the end of the list of software characteristics, often neglected entirely in master test plans, and frequently not even recognized as the root cause when we later get bitten by symptoms of poor maintainability. You would think that more attention would be paid to this aspect of software quality, wouldn’t you? After all, there is evidence that maintenance-related tasks can account for up to 80 percent of the effort spent on an application, measured over its entire life cycle. In fact, one should expect that the vast majority of the software’s life cycle is spent in the maintenance phase. This chapter tries to redress the imbalance and make the technical test analyst more ...