Maintainability

Engineering#edit

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#edit

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.

 This article incorporates public domain material from Federal Standard 1037C. General Services Administration. Archived from the original on 2022-01-22. (in support of MIL-STD-188).

Software#edit

In software engineering, these activities are known as software maintenance (cf. ISO/IEC 25010).^[2] Closely related concepts in the software engineering domain are evolvability, modifiability, technical debt, and code smells.

• List of system quality attributes, non-functional requirements for system evaluation
• Maintenance (technical), measures to preserve or restore the functionality or lifespan of equipment and infrastructure
• Supportability (disambiguation)
• Serviceability (disambiguation)
• Software sizing, activity in software development to estimate the size of a component, such as the number of lines of code or functions (not taking into account the effort required)
• Reliability, availability, maintainability and safety, characterization of a product or system
• Throw-away society, human society strongly influenced by consumerism

1. ^ Dhillon, Balbir S. (2006). Maintainability, Maintenance, and Reliability for Engineers. Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press. p. 12. doi:10.1201/9781420006780.
2. ^ Systems and software engineering — Systems and software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE) — System and software quality models (standard). International Organization for Standardization. 2023. ISO/IEC 25010:2023.

• Blanchard, Benjamin S.; Verma, Dinesh C.; Peterson, Elmer L. (1995). Maintainability: A Key to Effective Serviceability and Maintenance Management. Wiley. ISBN 978-0-471-59132-0.
• Ebeling, Charles E. (2019). An Introduction to Reliability and Maintainability Engineering (3rd ed.). Waveland Press. ISBN 978-1-4786-3933-6.
• Patton, Joseph D. (2005). Maintainability & Maintenance Management (4th ed.). Patton Consultants. ISBN 978-1-55617-944-0.

• "Calculation, Field testing and history of Maintainability Index (MI) (with references)". Virtual Machinery. Archived from the original on 2012-01-20.
• "Measurement of Maintainability Index (MI)". Verifysoft Technology GmbH. Archived from the original on 2011-06-23.* Foreman, John T.; Gross, Jon; Rosenstein, Robert; Fisher, David; Brune, Kimberly (January 1997). "Maintainability Index Technique for Measuring Program Maintainability". C4 Software Technology Reference Guide: A Prototype (PDF). Software Engineering Institute. p. 231. CMU/SEI-97-HB-001. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2022-10-09.