Towards a maintainability evaluation in software architectures

Maintainability is an internal quality characteristic that is contemplated by many users and developers, and therefore is deeply related to software architecture. It presents an organization of its components and relation which promote or obstruct different attributes like testability, changeability, and analyzability. As part of a research in progress, this article analyzes and organizes a set of architectural mechanisms that guarantee software maintainability. To propose the architectural mechanisms we decided first to construct an ontology, which helps identify all concepts related to Maintainability and their relationships. Then we decided to focus and specify mechanisms that promote maintainability, also we present a set of scenarios that will explore the presence at the architecture of those concepts previously identified, including the architectural mechanism analyzed. With the products described in this article we have the bases to develop an architectural evaluation method, which is based on maintainability.