Maintainability
Define maintainability as the system’s ability to be easily operated, understood, and modified. Explore how engineers measure this crucial non-functional requirement using the MTTR metric. Understand the relationship between maintainability and reliability for achieving high availability in System Design.
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What is maintainability?
After building a system, engineers must keep it operational. This involves fixing bugs, adding features, updating platforms, and ensuring smooth operations. Maintainability measures how easily a system supports these tasks. We can divide maintainability into three aspects:
Operability: The ease of ensuring smooth operations and recovering from faults.
Lucidity: The simplicity of the codebase. A simpler codebase is easier to understand and maintain.
Modifiability: The ability to integrate changes and new features without difficulty.
Measuring maintainability
Maintainability (M) is the probability that a service will restore its functions within a specified time after a fault. It measures how quickly the service returns to normal operating conditions. For example, if a component has a maintainability value of 95% for 30 minutes, the probability of restoring the component within that time is 0.95.