Quality Requirements for Code: On the Untapped Potential in Maintainability Specifications
Markus Borg
TL;DR
The paper tackles the gap between maintainability as an internal quality and Requirements Engineering practice, arguing for a bridge between code metrics and strategic decision making. It introduces six use cases across automotive, public procurement, OSS selection, legacy maintenance, due diligence, and evergreen VC evaluation to show how explicit maintainability requirements can guide procurement, partnerships, and investments. Preliminary findings question the applicability of the QUPER-based target model for maintainability and advocate an alternative value-mapping approach, with Code Health as a centric metric and three future directions for empirical, theoretical, and standards-oriented work. The work aims to operationalize maintainability in industry by integrating it into RE, governance, and risk-management processes, thereby enabling measurable business impact from code quality.
Abstract
Quality requirements are critical for successful software engineering, with maintainability being a key internal quality. Despite significant attention in software metrics research, maintainability has attracted surprisingly little focus in the Requirements Engineering (RE) community. This position paper proposes a synergistic approach, combining code-oriented research with RE expertise, to create meaningful industrial impact. We introduce six illustrative use cases and propose three future research directions. Preliminary findings indicate that the established QUPER model, designed for setting quality targets, does not adequately address the unique aspects of maintainability.