As a software project manager in a company that specializes in the development of software for the offshore oil industry, you have been given the task of discovering the factors that affect the maintainability of the systems developed by your company. Suggest how you might set up a program to analyze the maintenance process and determine appropriate maintainability metrics for the company.

What will be an ideal response?

This is a very open question, where there are many possible answers.
Basically, the students should identify factors which affect maintainability such as
(program and data complexity, use of meaningful identifiers, programming
language, program documentation etc.). They should then suggest how these can be
evaluated in existing systems whose maintenance cost is known and discuss
problems of interaction. The approach should be to discover those program units
which have particularly high maintenance costs and to evaluate the cost factors for
these components and for other components. Then check for correlations.
Other factors may account for anomalies so these should be looked for in
the problem components.