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A study was conducted to examine the impact of software structure on such maintainability aspects as comprehensibility, locality, modifiability, and reusability in a distributed system environment. The study, part of a project to design and implement a language for distributed systems (LADY), addressed the impact of software structure from 2 perspectives: 1. the language designer's perspective, to evaluate the general impact of the set of structural concepts chosen for LADY on the maintainability of software systems implemented in LADY, and 2. the language user's perspective, to derive structural criteria (metrics) that allow the explanation of prediction of the software maintenance behavior. A controlled maintenance experiment was conducted, and the benefits of the structural LADY concepts were judged based on a comparison of the average maintenance behavior of LADY systems and PASCAL systems. Maintenance metrics were derived by analyzing the interdependence between structure and maintenance behavior of each LADY system.