Maintenance and maintainability within agile software development

Abstract

In agile software development, software maintenance is present almost from the beginning of software development life cycle and is usually considered together with software evolution. Making changes in software, either as corrective, preventive, adaptive or perfective maintenance, comes with additional risks and costs. In this paper, we discuss formal static software verification approaches and their influence on triggering software maintenance processes and on lowering costs and risks through automating regression verification checks. We also discuss software maintainability as a key software quality attribute in context of the overall software quality and describe the effects of software refactoring to maintainability. We present formal static verification approaches that can support the refactoring process.