ABSTRACT Software maintenance becomes an integral part of software life cycle and constitutes the most important fraction of the total cost of the software lifecycle. Around 50-80 percent of the total lifecycle cost is consumed by maintenance for evolving system. Thus systems with poor maintainability are difficult to modify and require more cost to maintain. This difficulty arises from the impact of the system components where the new requirements/goals will be implemented. These new goals will result in modification of existing components and creation of new components. In this paper, we present the foundation for a new Hybrid-Based Maintainability Impact Analysis (HBMIA) methodology for assessing the impact of the new goals to be selected for implementation on the system new and existing components. (HBMIA) uses not only the system history but it also gets benefit from the expert’s experience. (HBMIA) balances between the system historical data and experts data based on the organization’ maturity and experts experience for system components. A case study is performed to demonstrate the added value of the proposed (HBMIA).
