Understanding the Test Maintainability Report. How element locators get created is one of the greatest barriers to creating maintainable web scenarios that withstand changes to a. Measuring Software Maintainability. Software maintenance costs result from modifying your application to either support new use cases or update existing ones, along with the continual bug fixing after deployment. As much as 70-80% of the Total Ownership Cost (TCO) of the software can be attributed to maintenance costs alone!.