Software development Life cycle model to improve maintainability of software applications

Software Maintainability is the business issue in large scale applications and it must be given adequate focus during software development process to minimize the downtime. Inculcating the maintainability features in the software application during its development can minimize the maintainability efforts during its real time use. In that view, this paper presents a new, Maintainable-Software Development Life Cycle model (M-SDLC) introducing maintainability development tasks or activities to be followed during the SDLC. This paper provides a set of activities and best practices for all stakeholders involved in the planning, architecting, coding and testing and maintenance software applications during development. This paper is also presented with a comparative study done on existing SDLC model and concludes that the present models are not adequately focusing on maintainability issues while building software products to minimize maintenance issues. We prove with statistical results that proposed new SDLC model is capable of building maintainable application.