Maintainability Glossary

Browse 8 maintainability terms defined in plain English, from the cultural dictionary of computing.

8 Maintainability Terms

Bus Factor OSS: The risk in an open source project that too much critical knowledge or authority is concentrated in too few maintainers, so losing them would severely harm...
Code Complexity: The degree to which code is difficult to understand, reason about, test, or modify due to branching, coupling, state, or structural depth. High code complexity...
Code Documentation: Written material that explains code behavior, APIs, assumptions, or usage, whether embedded in the source or maintained separately. Good code documentation...
Code Health: The overall maintainability and fitness of a codebase, considering readability, test coverage, dependency structure, duplication, and how costly future changes...
Code Organization: The way files, modules, folders, and responsibilities are arranged within a codebase. Good code organization makes dependencies and ownership clearer, while...
Code Quality: The overall standard of a codebase in terms of readability, correctness, testability, maintainability, and adherence to team conventions. Code quality is not...
Code Reuse: The practice of sharing or reusing existing code instead of reimplementing the same logic repeatedly across a codebase or organization. Effective code reuse...
Tight Coupling: A design condition where two modules depend heavily on each other's internal details — concrete classes, data structures, or execution order — making it...