A Comparative Analysis of Maintainability Approaches for Web Applications

Web applications incorporate important business assets and offer a convenient way for businesses to promote their services through the internet. Many of these web applications have evolved from simple HTML pages to complex applications that have high maintenance cost. The high maintenance cost of web applications is due to the inherent characteristics of web applications, to the fast internet evolution and to the pressing market which imposes short development cycles and frequent modifications In order to control the maintenance cost, quantitative metrics and model; for predicting web applications' maintainability must be used. Since, web applications are different from traditional software systems, models and metrics for traditional systems can not be applied to web applications. The reason for that is that web applications have special features such as hyper-text structure, dynamic code generation and heterogenousity that can not be captured by traditional and object-oriented metrics. In this paper, we will provide a comparative analysis of the different approaches for predicting web applications' maintainability and point out areas that need further research.