What are the common trade-offs and challenges of system maintainability vs modifiability in your domain?

2 System modifiability

System modifiability is the ease with which a system can be changed or adapted to meet new or evolving requirements, needs, or opportunities. This affects the flexibility, scalability, and competitiveness of a system, as well as the development and maintenance costs. Factors that influence system modifiability include volatility and complexity of the requirements, which should be analyzed and prioritized to identify the most critical changes. Adaptability and extensibility should enable incremental and modular changes without compromising system integrity, functionality, or performance. Reusability and compatibility should enable reuse of existing components or subsystems, or integration of new or external components with minimal modifications or conflicts. Traceability and verifiability should ensure changes are properly documented, tracked, and validated against requirements and specifications.

3 Trade-offs and challenges

System maintainability and modifiability are often interrelated and interdependent, but they can also be conflicting and competing. For example, a system that is highly maintainable may not be easily modifiable, or vice versa. Achieving both maintainability and modifiability may incur higher costs, complexity, or risks. Therefore, system engineers need to consider the trade-offs and challenges that arise from balancing these two aspects in their domain. This could include the trade-off between performance and robustness, innovation and standardization, stability and evolution, as well as the challenge of uncertainty and variability, complexity and interdependency, and coordination and communication. All of these factors must be managed to create a successful system engineering process.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?