Difference between Maintainability and Manageability

[Raghavendra Desoju]

Folks,
I am confused with the NFRs Maintainability and Manageability. Could someone clarify what is the difference between these two?

Thanks, Raghu

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Raghu,
Great question. Maintainability has to do with making changes to the system. Can you make a coding change to fix a bug or add new functionality without great difficulty or causing regression problems elsewhere. Manageability is for the running system. Is it up? How do you know? Does it have a performance issue?

[AnkitKumar Singh]

Good Question and Great answer by Jeanne.

We can also try to understand using example of any application which is going to be upgraded

Manageability
1. What is the cost of the upgrade 100 $
2. What is the complexity Medium
3. Is it reliableYes
Another examples:
4. Is application compatible with CRM system?  Yes
5. Can we use cloud services?  Yes



Maintainability : How difficult it will be to maintain the application/code/system? The factor affecting maintainability can be -
1. Did we use logging mechanism?
2. What language is being used?
3. Are we using continuous integration tool like Jenkins or teamcity?
4. Is automated testing being used?
5. Can application be started automatically if the machine is rebooted/restarted?
6. Can we add new functionality easily?

The answers of above questions explain how maintainability of the application is?