maintainability
{{Short description|Ease of maintaining a functioning product or service}}
{{No footnotes|date=May 2013}}
Maintainability is the ease of maintaining or providing maintenance for a functioning product or service. Depending on the field, it can have slightly different meanings.
Usage in different fields
= Engineering =
In engineering, maintainability is the ease with which a product can be maintained to:
- correct defects or their cause,
- Repair or replace faulty or worn-out components without having to replace still working parts,
- prevent unexpected working conditions,
- maximize a product's useful life,
- maximize efficiency, reliability, and safety,
- meet new requirements,
- make future maintenance easier, or
- cope with a changing environment.
In some cases, maintainability involves a system of continuous improvement - learning from the past to improve the ability to maintain systems, or improve the reliability of systems based on maintenance experience.
= Telecommunication =
In telecommunications and several other engineering fields, the term maintainability has the following meanings:
- A characteristic of design and installation, expressed as the probability that an item will be retained in or restored to a specified condition within a given period of time, when the maintenance is performed by prescribed procedures and resources.
- The ease with which maintenance of a functional unit can be performed by prescribed requirements.
{{FS1037C MS188}}
= Software =
{{main|Software_maintenance#Maintainability}}
In software engineering, these activities are known as software maintenance (cf. ISO/IEC 9126). Closely related concepts in the software engineering domain are evolvability, modifiability, technical debt, and code smells.
See also
References
{{Reflist}}
Further reading
- {{cite book |first=Benjamin S. |last=Blanchard |first2=Dinesh C. |last2=Verma |first3=Elmer L. |last3=Peterson |title=Maintainability: A Key to Effective Serviceability and Maintenance Management |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=7B02w3If-GIC |date=1995 |publisher=Wiley |isbn=978-0-471-59132-0}}
- {{cite book |first=Charles E. |last=Ebeling |title=An Introduction to Reliability and Maintainability Engineering |edition=3rd |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=rh2WDwAAQBAJ |date=2019 |publisher=Waveland Press |isbn=978-1-4786-3933-6}}
- {{cite book |first=Joseph D. |last=Patton |title=Maintainability & Maintenance Management |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=NrbpAAAAMAAJ |year=2005 |publisher=Patton Consultants |isbn=978-1-55617-944-0 |edition=4th}}
External links
- [http://www.virtualmachinery.com/sidebar4.htm Calculation, Field testing and history of Maintainability Index (MI) (with references)]
- [http://www.verifysoft.com/en_maintainability.html Measurement of Maintainability Index (MI)]
- {{cite book |first=John T. |last=Foreman |first2=Jon |last2=Gross |first3=Robert |last3=Rosenstein |first4=David |last4=Fisher |first5=Kimberly |last5=Brune |url=http://www.sei.cmu.edu/reports/97hb001.pdf |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20221009/http://www.sei.cmu.edu/reports/97hb001.pdf |archive-date=2022-10-09 |url-status=live |chapter=Maintainability Index Technique for Measuring Program Maintainability |title=C4 Software Technology Reference Guide: A Prototype |page=231 |id=CMU/SEI-97-HB-001 |date=January 1997 |publisher=Software Engineering Institute}}
{{Software quality}}
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