A Comparison of Code Maintainability in Agile Environment

Abstract

The demand for quick delivery of quality software is becoming high among software clients due to the fast changing technology in the dynamic world. Agile software development meets this demand and has gained appropriate and wide acceptance among software practitioners. However, the quality of such software is greatly impacted by its maintainability. Unfortunately, existing works focused only on the flexibility aspect of maintainability without paying attention to timely delivery. In this work, maintainability as a function of time to correct codes was examined among various categories of software developers. Deliberate errors, ranging from two to nine, were introduced into sets of agile codes written in python programming language and given to 100 programmers, each in the groups of individual junior, individual expert, random, expert pairs, junior pairs and junior expert pairs. The results revealed that random pair programmers spent the highest time of 21.88 min/bug on the average, while individual experts spent the least time of 16.26 min/bug.