| Full title | Plan early and implement adequate maintainability-related activities |
|---|
| Objective | Include in the development cycle (as early as possible) activities that foster and improve the maintainability of the product |
|---|
| Applicability | This practice spans two phases of the project: development and maintenance. |
|---|
| Context | The practice applies to all projects, but in particular to the ones that are expected to be maintained in the long term. |
|---|
| Addressed elements in SMM | 5.1. Planning and designing for maintainability |
|---|
| Actions | - Monitor measures of maintainability for the product
- Consider using technical debt as the primary measure of maintainability
- Assign responsibility for monitoring the maintainability
- Provide training on writing maintainable code to the team members
- Report, manage and handle the issues related to maintainability
- Iteratively refactor the product
- Allocate time (preferably, in each development cycle) for managing the technical debt and code refactoring
- Provide training on refactoring to the team members
|
|---|
| Risks | - Maintainability is not measured or the product is not refactored regularly
- The project becomes unmaintainable
- Technical debt increases
- Development of new features and fixing defects requires more and more effort
|
|---|
| Related practices | BP-B.5: Manage product issues |
|---|
