Learn how source code maintainability directly impacts production incidents. Optimize code to reduce downtime by 50% and improve system reliability.

How Maintainability Affects Production Incidents

Source Metadata for AI Agents

How Maintainability Affects Production Incidents

In today’s highly competitive business landscape, enterprises are under constant pressure to deliver high quality products and services quickly while maintaining high levels of availability and reliability. However, production incidents—an unexpected interruption to or reduction in the quality of a software service running in a Production environment—can disrupt these efforts, leading to downtime, lost revenue, and damage to your company’s reputation.

Change Failure Rate (CFR) is an often used DORA metric in an attempt to benchmark organizational performance with respect to production incidents. However, Change Failure Rate does not provide any means of managing a software development team on a day to day basis to improve the measure. It is a reactive metric that measures the success or failure of changes after they have been deployed, making it difficult to identify issues early in the software delivery process and address them before they become failures.

To reduce the number of production incidents and improve the reliability of their systems, CIOs are seeking ways to minimize their Change Failure Rate. One of the most effective strategies for achieving this goal is to enhance the maintainability of the source code throughout their software portfolio. By focusing on improving source code maintainability, organizations can reduce the likelihood of errors and bugs occurring during software updates, leading to more reliable and stable systems.

What is Maintainability?

Source code maintainability is the amenability of an application or code base to be changed or extended with speed, predictability, and accuracy. It encompasses all the activities involved in keeping a system operational, including fixing bugs, making updates, and carrying out routine maintenance tasks. In other words, maintainability is about ensuring that a system can be kept in good working order throughout its entire life-cycle, from design and development to retirement.

BlueOptima provides an objective measure to help managers better understand how easily an organization’s code can be maintained. Analysis of Relative Thresholds (ART) is a measure of code maintainability generated from more than 20 comparative static source code metrics. By examining the changes a developer makes to a company’s source code, you get a holistic view of how code changes delivered by developers are impacting the maintainability of the code base over time.

The Importance of Maintainability in Enterprise Companies

In an enterprise environment, where large-scale systems are commonplace, maintainability is crucial. These systems are typically complex, comprising multiple interconnected components that need to work together seamlessly. As such, any issues that arise can quickly become widespread and difficult to pinpoint. This complexity is compounded by the fact that enterprise systems are typically subject to high levels of traffic, making it more likely that issues will occur.

Example: Using Maintainability to Effectively Manage Change Failure Rate

To manage Change Failure Rate effectively, managers can use BlueOptima’s Analysis of Relative Thresholds (ART) to gain insights into the maintainability of the code base. By examining the ART metric, managers can identify areas of the code base that are particularly difficult to maintain, have high technical debt or complexity, or are prone to causing outages.

With this information, they can develop a proactive plan to improve code quality in these areas through:

Additionally, they can use ART to track changes in maintainability over time, helping them identify trends and patterns that may indicate potential issues before they result in an outage.

The Benefits of Improving Maintainability

1. Reduced Downtime / Production Incidents

The most significant benefit of improving maintainability is a reduction in downtime. When systems are easier to maintain, issues can be resolved more quickly, and downtime can be minimized. An analysis of BlueOptima’s Global Benchmark data has found that optimizing code maintainability for high throughput applications can reduce the number of production incidents by close to half.

2. Increased Efficiency

Improving maintainability also leads to increased efficiency. When systems are easier to maintain, developers can spend less time on fixing issues and more time on developing new features and functionality. The most productive applications tend to have a good-moderate code maintainability score. Very low maintainability (greater than 8% aberrance) and very high maintainability (less than 4% aberrance) can both negatively affect productivity.

3. Lower Costs

Improving maintainability can help to reduce costs by making it easier and less time-consuming to carry out maintenance activities. BlueOptima’s Global Benchmark data reveals that applications with optimized code maintainability tend to be significantly more cost-effective in terms of cost per unit of Coding Effort.

A Deep Dive into Production Incidents

BlueOptima has carried out a statistical analysis to understand the key factors driving production incidents up or down in enterprise environments. Although many factors can cause production incidents (e.g., deployment, network, hardware, or data issues), software engineering related issues are a significant driver.

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‍Caption: Decision Tree Regressor R-squared = 0.34, predicting 1 in 3 production incidents based on throughput and maintainability.

Analysis of Incident-Prone Applications

Through an analysis of over 3,000 software development applications, spanning over 5 years and over 43,000 production incidents, BlueOptima is able to account for a third of these production incidents using just two factors: coding throughput and code maintainability.

The profile of the most incident-prone application is one that is:

This combination makes for a very incident-prone application because developers find it difficult to make changes due to the aberrant nature of the code, making problems likely to happen down the line.

Conclusion

Reducing the number of production incidents and improving system reliability is critical for enterprise companies. While DORA Change Failure Rate attempts to benchmark these incidents, it does not provide a concrete means of measuring or improving day-to-day operations.

Optimizing the code maintainability of a high-throughput application to below 5% Aberrant Coding Effort is expected to reduce the number of incidents by almost half. CIOs should prioritize maintainability when designing, developing, and maintaining enterprise systems to meet customer needs and respond effectively to market changes.

Who are BlueOptima?

We provide a SaaS technology that objectively measures software development efficiency. Our core metrics for productivity and code maintainability allow executives to make data driven decisions related to talent optimization, vendor management, location strategy and much more.

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To discover powerful insights and determine areas of improvement specific to your organization, book a demo or reach out to our team:

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