Maintainability is the ability of any application to go through modifications and updates with a degree of ease. This is the degree of flexibility with which the application can be modified, whether for bug fixes or to update functionality. These changes may impact any of the components, services, functionality, or interfaces in the application landscape while modifying to fix errors, or to meet changing business requirements.

This is also the degree of time it takes to restore the system to its normal state following a failure or fault. Improving maintainability can improve the availability and reduce the runtime defects. An application's maintainability is dependent on the overall quality attributes.

It is critical as a large chunk of the IT budget is spent on maintenance of systems. The more maintainable a system is, the lower the total cost of ownership.

The following attributes are:

• Conformance to design standards, coding standards, best practices, reference architectures, and frameworks
• Flexibility is the degree to which the system is intended to support change
• Release support is the way in which the system supports the introduction of initial release, phased roll outs, and future releases