A Disturbing Result on the Knowledge Used during Software Maintenance

As part of a long term project aiming at empowering software maintainers with knowledge based tools we conducted an empirical study on the knowledge they use when doing maintenance. For example, it is commonly assumed that Application Domain knowledge is fundamental when doing maintenance. The goal of this study is to validate this assumption by monitoring software engineers and analyzing the knowledge they used in their maintenance activity. We studied six software engineers in two different organizations. In this paper we present and discuss some results and propose research directions from these. Our results include: the fact that software engineers rarely “search for” some new knowledge and rather work from what they already know; or the acknowledgment of a variation of the knowledge used depending on the organization one is working in. The most disturbing result is that, contrary to what is commonly assumed, the software engineers we studied seemed to make little use of appli...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: WCRE
• Authors: Maria Fernanda N. Ramal, Ricardo de Moura Meneses, Nicolas Anquetil
• Keywords: Application Domain Knowledge, Knowledge Based Tools, Software Engineering, Software Engineers, WCRE 2002