Maintainability is the ease of maintaining or providing

maintenance The technical meaning of maintenance involves functional checks, servicing, repairing or replacing of necessary devices, equipment, machinery, building infrastructure and supporting utilities in industrial, business, and residential installa ...

for a functioning product or service. Depending on the field, it can have slightly different meanings.

Usage in different fields

Engineering

engineering Engineering is the practice of using natural science, mathematics, and the engineering design process to Problem solving#Engineering, solve problems within technology, increase efficiency and productivity, and improve Systems engineering, s ...

, maintainability is the ease with which a product can be maintained to: * correct defects or their cause, *

Repair The technical meaning of maintenance involves functional checks, servicing, repairing or replacing of necessary devices, equipment, machinery, building infrastructure and supporting utilities in industrial, business, and residential installat ...

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 In engineering, a requirement is a condition that must be satisfied for the output of a work effort to be acceptable. It is an explicit, objective, clear and often quantitative description of a condition to be satisfied by a material, design, pro ...

, * 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

telecommunications Telecommunication, often used in its plural form or abbreviated as telecom, is the transmission of information over a distance using electronic means, typically through cables, radio waves, or other communication technologies. These means of ...

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 Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequ ...

, when the

is performed by prescribed procedures and resources. * The ease with which maintenance of a functional unit can be performed by prescribed requirements.

Software

software engineering Software engineering is a branch of both computer science and engineering focused on designing, developing, testing, and maintaining Application software, software applications. It involves applying engineering design process, engineering principl ...

, these activities are known as

software maintenance Software maintenance is the modification of software after delivery. Software maintenance is often considered lower skilled and less rewarding than new development. As such, it is a common target for outsourcing or offshoring. Usually, the tea ...

(cf.

ISO/IEC 9126 ISO/IEC 9126 ''Software engineering — Product quality'' was an international standard for the evaluation of software quality. It has been replaced by ISO/IEC 25010:2011. The fundamental objective of the ISO/IEC 9126 standard is to address som ...

). Closely related concepts in the software engineering domain are evolvability, modifiability, technical debt, and code smells.

References

External links

Calculation, Field testing and history of Maintainability Index (MI) (with references)

* {{Authority control Telecommunications engineering Design for X Maintenance Software quality Broad-concept articles