How to improve the Maintainability Index of the Plato report

Question

I have generated the Plato report for the AngularJS code and now I want to know how I can improve the Maintainability Index. Lint errors improvement does not improve the Maintainability Index. Any refernce links, very much appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Take a look at this site, which gives a formula for the Oman/Hagemeister Maintainability Index.

Values are on a logarithmic scale ranging from negative infinity up to 171, with greater numbers indicating a higher level of maintainability. In their original paper, Oman and Hagemeister identified 65 as the threshold value below which a program should be considered difficult to maintain.

DEPENDENCIES A list of dependencies from calls to CommonJS and AMD require. Analysed statically from the function signature, so no accounting is made for dynamic calls where a variable or function is obscuring the nature of the dependency. Fewer is better.

FIRST-ORDER DENSITY The percentage of all possible internal dependencies that are actually realised in the project. Lower is better.

CHANGE COST The percentage of modules affected, on average, when one module in the project is changed. Lower is better.

CORE SIZE The percentage of modules that are both widely depended on and themselves depend on other modules. Lower is better.

I can't find whether Plato uses this or not, but hopefully this will help you understand what goes into metrics like this.