Measuring and assessing maintainability at the end of high level design

Software architecture appears to be one of the main factors affecting software maintainability. Therefore, in order to be able to predict and assess maintainability early in the development process one needs to be able to measure the high-level design characteristics that affect the change process. To this end, a measurement approach based on precise assumptions derived from the change process is proposed. The change process is based on object-oriented design principles and is partially language independent. Metrics for cohesion, coupling, and visibility are defined in order to capture the difficulty of isolating, understanding, designing and validating changes.