Editing Software maintenance (section)

==Maintainability==
{{main|Maintainability}}
Maintainability is the quality of software enabling it to be easily modified without breaking existing functionality.{{sfn|Varga|2018|p=5}} According to the  ISO/IEC 14764 specification, activity to ensure software maintainability prior to release counts as part of software maintenance.{{sfn|Tripathy |Naik|2014|p=26}} Many software development organizations neglect maintainability, even though doing so will increase long-term costs.{{sfn|Varga|2018|p=12}} [[Technical debt]] is incurred when programmers, often out of laziness or urgency to meet a deadline, choose quick and dirty solutions rather than build maintainability into their code.{{sfn|Varga|2018|pp=6-7}} A common cause is underestimates in [[software development effort estimation]], leading to insufficient resources allocated to development.{{sfn|Varga|2018|p=7}} One important aspect is having a large amount of automated [[software test]]s that can detect if existing functionality is compromised by a change.{{sfn|Varga|2018|p=5}} 

A challenge with maintainability is that many [[software engineering]] courses do not emphasize it, and give out one-and-done assignments that have clear and unchanging specifications.{{sfn|Varga|2018|pp=7-8}} Software engineering courses do not cover systems as complex as occur in the real world.{{sfn|Varga|2018|p=9}} Development engineers who know that they will not be responsible for maintaining the software do not have an incentive to build in maintainability.<ref name=Offutt/>