Understanding maintainability use cases

Testing maintainability features is a form of black-box testing that checks functions that a specific group of users needs, so it is quite separate from code maintainability.

Code maintenance requires that your code is well architected, with minimal dependencies and clearly defined interfaces between modules. It needs a clear directory structure and comments to allow developers to easily find code and understand it, among many other considerations. However, these are outside the scope of this book and aren’t the focus of this chapter.

Maintainability, here, refers to product features for users inside your company. That includes groups such as the following:

• The operations team ensuring a hosted application runs reliably
• The support team triaging customer issues
• The product owner checking feature usage
• The test and development teams debugging errors

You might release a brilliant new feature that your customers...