Overview
Maintainability reviews fail when they focus on aesthetic preferences — tabs vs. spaces, brace placement, line length — rather than the structural issues that make code difficult to change. The question is not "does this look neat?" but "can a developer who didn't write this code understand, test, and safely modify it six months from now?" Code that passes a linter but violates the principle of least surprise — where names don't match behavior, where side effects are hidden in accessor methods, where coupling is invisible — will resist change and produce bugs when modified.
The Code Maintainability Review Framework identifies structural issues that compound over time: naming that lies, complexity that can't be tested in isolation, and coupling that makes changes unpredictable.