Software metrics in maintenance phase of object oriented software development life cycle

Software maintenance is a task that every development team has to face when software is delivered to the customer's site, installed and is in operational state. The time spent and the effort required keeping the software operational after release is very significant and consumes about 50–70% of the cost of the entire lifecycle. Hence it becomes a challenging task for an organization to predict the maintainability of their software system in order to manage their software resources efficiently. This helps them to in reducing the maintenance effort as well as the total cost and time spent on a software project. This main aim of this paper is to focus on some existing maintenance metrics and their limitations. Some new metrics have also been suggested to effectively measure the maintenance efforts depending upon the software project needs.