Measurement for the management of software maintenance

This thesis addresses the problem of bringing maintenance, in a commercial environment, under management control, and also increasing the profile of maintenance in a corporate picture, bringing it onto a par with other components of the business. This management control will help reduce costs and also the time scales inherent in maintenance activity. This objective is achieved by showing how the measurement of the products and processes involved in maintenance activity, at a team level, increases the visibility of the tasks being tackled. This increase in visibility provides the ability to impose control on the products and processes and provides the basis for prediction and estimation of future states of a project and the future requirements of the team. This is the foundation of good management. Measurement also provides an increase in visibility for higher management of the company, forming a basis for communication within the corporate strategy, allowing maintenance to be seen as it is, and furnished with the resources it requires. A method for the introduction of a measurement strategy, and collection system, is presented, supported by the examination of a database of maintenance information collected by a British Telecom research team, during a commercial software maintenance exercise. A prototype system for the collection of software change information is also presented, demonstrating the application of the method, along with the results of its development and the implications for both software maintenance management and the technical tasks of implementing change

A software maintenance method based on the software configuration management discipline

Software maintenance has until recently been the neglected phase in the software engineering process, despite the fact that maintenance of existing software systems may account for over half of all efforts expended by a software organization. Research into software maintenance, compared to other phases of the software engineering process is rare. Moreover, it is widely accepted that current software maintenance methods and techniques are unable to cope with the complexity inherent in maintaining software systems. This thesis is concerned with the development of a method, named Configuration Management Formalization for Maintenance (COMFORM), designed for the maintenance of existing software systems. COMFORM provides guidelines and procedures for carrying out a variety of activities performed during software maintenance. It accommodates a change control framework, around which the Software Configuration Management discipline is applied. Redocumentation is another problem tackled by COMFORM, which gathers together the documentation necessary to improve the maintainability and quality of existing software systems. This is achieved by the use of forms representing the output of each phase of a proposed software maintenance model. The information obtained by filling in forms is formalized according to a data model, which provides a common basis for the representation of the method's functionality. Finally, a prototype of COMFORM has been implemented, so that the procedures and guidelines set up by the method can be enforced and followed by its users

VTrace-A Tool for Visualizing Traceability Links Among Software Artefacts for an Evolving System

Traceability Management plays a key role in tracing the life of a requirement through all the specifications produced during the development phase of a software project. A lack of traceability information not only hinders the understanding of the system but also will prove to be a bottleneck in the future maintenance of the system. Projects that maintain traceability information during the development stages somehow fail to upgrade their artefacts or maintain traceability among the different versions of the artefacts that are produced during the maintenance phase. As a result the software artefacts lose the trustworthiness and engineers mostly work from the source code for impact analysis. The goal of our research is on understanding the impact of visualizing traceability links on change management tasks for an evolving system. As part of our research we have implemented a Traceability Visualization Tool-VTrace that manages software artefacts and also enables the visualization of traceability links. The results of our controlled experiment show that subjects who used the tool were more accurate and faster on change management tasks than subjects that didn't use the tool

VTrace-A Tool for Visualizing Traceability Links among Software Artefacts for an Evolving System

Traceability Management plays a key role in tracing the life of a requirement through all the specifications produced during the development phase of a software project. A lack of traceability information not only hinders the understanding of the system but also will prove to be a bottleneck in the future maintenance of the system. Projects that maintain traceability information during the development stages somehow fail to upgrade their artefacts or maintain traceability among the different versions of the artefacts that are produced during the maintenance phase. As a result the software artefacts lose the trustworthiness and engineers mostly work from the source code for impact analysis. The goal of our research is on understanding the impact of visualizing traceability links on change management tasks for an evolving system. As part of our research we have implemented a Traceability Visualization Tool-VTrace that manages software artefacts and also enables the visualization of traceability links. The results of our controlled experiment show that subjects who used the tool were more accurate and faster on change management tasks than subjects that didn’t use the tool

Supporting Project Comprehension with Revision Control System Repository Analysis

Context: Project comprehension is an activity relevant to all aspects of software engineering, from requirements specification to maintenance. The historical, transactional data stored in revision control systems can be mined and analysed to produce a great deal of information about a project. Aims: This research aims to explore how the data-mining, analysis and presentation of revision control systems can be used to augment aspects of project comprehension, including change prediction, maintenance, visualization, management, profiling, sampling and assessment. Method: A series of case studies investigate how transactional data can be used to support project comprehension. A thematic analysis of revision logs is used to explore the development process and developer behaviour. A benchmarking study of a history-based model of change prediction is conducted to assess how successfully such a technique can be used to augment syntax-based models. A visualization tool is developed for managers of student projects with the aim of evaluating what visualizations best support their roles. Finally, a quasi-experiment is conducted to determine how well an algorithmic model can automatically select a representative sample of code entities from a project, in comparison with expert strategies. Results: The thematic analysis case study classified maintenance activities in 22 undergraduate projects and four real-world projects. The change prediction study calculated information retrieval metrics for 34 undergraduate projects and three real-world projects, as well as an in-depth exploration of the model's performance and applications in two selected projects. File samples for seven projects were generated by six experts and three heuristic models and compared to assess agreement rates, both within the experts and between the experts and the models. Conclusions: When the results from each study are evaluated together, the evidence strongly shows that the information stored in revision control systems can indeed be used to support a range of project comprehension activities in a manner which complements existing, syntax-based techniques. The case studies also help to develop the empirical foundation of repository analysis in the areas of visualization, maintenance, sampling, profiling and management; the research also shows that students can be viable substitutes for industrial practitioners in certain areas of software engineering research, which weakens one of the primary obstacles to empirical studies in these areas

Updating database schemas without breaking the UI: Modeling using cognitive semantic categories

PublishedData management user interfaces are ubiquitous in information systems and web-based applications. From the oldest spreadsheet to the most modern database, end users and administrators alike have interacted with tabular data. Usually, each concept is represented by a table and columns. Change to the structure of each concept requires structural change to the tables and columns, which is costly. Tailor-made database and web applications may overcome this obstacle by designing UIs on top of the data layer, providing some degree of data independence. However, changes in their schemas do not automatically propagate into the user interface, and so their maintenance is expensive. In this paper we present a user interface that lets the end user alter the schema without the need for programming skills, eliminating the need for expensive software maintenance. To this end we propose an automatically generated user interface to include schema and data management functions. We built and evaluated an Adaptive Information System user interface (AIS UI), incorporating schema evolution functionality. In usability testing, firsttime users were able to perform various data management tasks equally fast or faster than users using Microsoft Access, and on average ̃43% faster than users using Microsoft Excel. Task completion rates using the AIS significantly exceeded those using Microsoft Access and were comparable (>95%) with those using Microsoft Excel. Copyright © 2014 ACM 978-1-4503-2725-1/14/06

Technology adoption : a study on post-implementation perceptions and acceptance of computerised maintenance management systems

Information and communications systems are increasingly being used to capture, record, store, transmit and retrieve data to manage the maintenance of equipment and physical infrastructure. The justification for the costs incurred in implementing computerised information systems subsumes that acceptance of the associated technology by the users will provide the desired future benefits to the business organisation. The study assumes that the respective organisations were ready for the implied change, and thus applied the premise that perception influences acceptance to assess the implementation of computerised maintenance management software systems in a number of user organisations. Respondents to the study indicated that ease of use, usefulness and system characteristics were strongly dependent on the level of training of the user during the implementation of the computerised maintenance management software system, thus reiterating that user training influences perception which, in turn, influences user acceptance of technology. A model to predict user perception is developed based on data arising from respondent feedback.http://www.elsevier.com/locate/techsoc2016-11-30hb201

The More the Merrier: Leveraging on the Bug Inflow to Guide Software Maintenance

Issue management, a central part of software maintenance, requires much effort for complex software systems. The continuous inflow of issue reports makes it hard for developers to stay on top of the situation, and the threatening information overload makes activities such as duplicate management, Issue Assignment (IA), and Change Impact Analysis (CIA) tedious and error-prone. Still, most practitioners work with tools that act as little more than issue containers. Machine Learning encompasses approaches that identify patterns or make predictions based on empirical data. While humans have limited ability to work with big data, ML instead tends to improve the more training data that is available. Consequently, we argue that the challenge of information overload in issue management appears to be particularly suitable for ML-based tool support. While others have initially explored the area, we develop two ML-based tools, and evaluate them in proprietary software engineering contexts. We replicated [1] for five projects in two companies, and our automated IA obtains an accuracy matching the current manual processes. Thus, as our solution delivers instantaneous IA, an organization can potentially save considerable analysis effort. Moreover, for the most comprehensive of the five projects, we implemented automated CIA in the tool ImpRec [3]. We evaluated the tool in a longitudinal in situ study, i.e., deployment in two development teams in industry. Based on log analysis and complementary interviews using the QUPER model [2] for utility assessment, we conclude that ImpRec offered helpful support in the CIA task

Design of Web-Based Material Management Information System in Financial Module (Case Study PT INTI)

PT INTI engaged in telecommunication, has long become a supplier of network construction with a large scale that is national. Therefore, PT INTI has a lot of material and spread all over the city in Indonesia. Previously, PT Inti still uses semi-manual way to do their material recording. The material recording is done by using Microsoft Excel which will be sent by electronic mail (email) if needed. But it is vulnerable to errors because the data contained in is not integrated. To overcome this, PT INTI wants to have a web based application called INTI Maintenance to manage financial materials such as material input, material search, material removal, material search, material data printing, to finance such as request addition, change of request status, delivery, and residual balances of each city. INTI Maintenance web-based information system financial module is built with open source software that uses PHP as the programming language, MySQL as the database, and Windows as server computer. The final results achieved in the material management information system in this module have advantages in assisting PT INTI employees in managing financial data and validation for material delivery using receipt of delivery material.   Keywords—information system, management, material, finance