A controlled experiment in assessing and estimating software maintenance tasks

Nguyen, Vu; Boehm, Barry; Danphitsanuphan, Phongphan

doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2010.11.003

Cited by 26 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Nguyen, Boehm & Danphitsanuphan (2011) deal with assessing and estimating software maintenance tasks. De Lucia, Pompella & Stefanucci (2002) investigate the effort estimation for corrective software maintenance.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The scenario for solving the provided maintenance tasks includes the following activities (Nguyen, Boehm & Danphitsanuphan, 2011):…”

Section: Maintenance Activitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Similar to other studies (Chan, 2008;Nguyen, Boehm & Danphitsanuphan, 2011;Ricca et al, 2012), we define two factors which represent the completion of the maintenance tasks:…”

Section: Tasks Completionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Are suggestions from coupled file changes useful for perfective maintenance tasks?

Ramadani

Wagner

2017

PeerJ Computer Science

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Background. Software maintenance is an important activity in the development process where maintenance team members leave and new members join over time. The identification of files which are changed together frequently has been proposed several times. Yet, existing studies about coupled file changes ignore the feedback from developers as well as the impact of these changes on the performance of maintenance and rather these studies rely on the analysis findings and expert evaluation. Methods. We investigate the usefulness of coupled file changes during perfective maintenance tasks when developers are inexperienced in programming or when they were new on the project. Using data mining on software repositories we identify files that are changed most frequently together in the past. We extract coupled file changes from the Git repository of a Java software system and join them with corresponding attributes from the versioning and issue tracking system and the project documentation. We present a controlled experiment involving 36 student participants in which we investigate if coupled file change suggestions influence the correctness of the task solutions and the required time to complete them. Results. The results show that the use of coupled file change suggestions significantly increases the correctness of the solutions. However, there is only a minor effect on the time required to complete the perfective maintenance tasks. We also derived a set of the most useful attributes based on the developers' feedback. Discussion. Coupled file changes and a limited number of the proposed attributes are useful for inexperienced developers working on perfective maintenance tasks where although the developers using these suggestions solved more tasks, they still need time to understand and organize this information.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The scenario for solving the provided maintenance tasks includes the following activities (Nguyen, Boehm & Danphitsanuphan, 2011):…”

Section: Maintenance Activitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Are suggestions from coupled file changes useful for perfective maintenance tasks?

Ramadani

Wagner

2017

PeerJ Computer Science

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“…Nguyen et al [26] describe the assessment and estimation of software maintenance tasks. De Lucia et al [7] investigate the effort estimation for corrective software maintenance.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Do Coupled File Changes Influence How Developers Seek Help During Maintenance Tasks?

Ramadani

Wagner

2017

2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS)

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Abstract-Software repositories contain a lot of information that can be transformed into suggestions other files they need to modify during maintenance tasks (so-called "coupled changes"). Existing studies however ignore developer feedback and their influence on the developer strategy for getting help during maintenance tasks. We used the Grounded Theory approach to investigate screen capture videos from an experiment to find which information sources developers use to find help and what is their relevance. We compared the frequency as well as the sequence patterns of used information sources both for the developers using coupled change suggestions and those not using them. We found a set of information sources where the developers seek for help and identified two categories of relevance. Also, we discovered that for the tasks using coupled change suggestions, the developers used mostly the internal IDE elements as an information source whereby the developers not using coupled change suggestions often used external sources like the documentation or the web. Coupled change suggestions influence the strategy how the developers seek for help by reducing the search for information on external locations which makes the process of solving maintenance tasks more compact.

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“…At the same time they need to satisfy the stakeholder in order to promote the product. [52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61][62] …”

Section: Organizational Strategies and Social Interaction In Decismentioning

confidence: 99%

Organizational Strategies and Social Interaction Influence in Software Development Effort Estimation

Rao¹,

Seetharamaiah²

2014

IOSRJCE

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A controlled experiment in assessing and estimating software maintenance tasks

Cited by 26 publications

References 23 publications

Are suggestions from coupled file changes useful for perfective maintenance tasks?

Are suggestions from coupled file changes useful for perfective maintenance tasks?

How Do Coupled File Changes Influence How Developers Seek Help During Maintenance Tasks?

Organizational Strategies and Social Interaction Influence in Software Development Effort Estimation

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