TY - JOUR
T1 - Determining the Distribution of Maintenance Categories
T2 - Survey versus Measurement
AU - Schach, Stephen R.
AU - Jin, Bo
AU - Yu, Liguo
AU - Heller, Gillian Z.
AU - Offutt, Jeff
PY - 2003/12
Y1 - 2003/12
N2 - In 1978, Lientz, Swanson, and Tompkins published the results of a survey on software maintenance. They found that 17.4% of maintenance effort was categorized as corrective in nature, 18.2% as adaptive, 60.3% as perfective, and 4.1% was categorized as other. We refer to this as the "LSI" result. We contrast this survey-based result with our empirical results from the analysis of data for the repeated maintenance of three software products: a commercial real-time product, the Linux kernel, and GCC. For all three products and at both levels of granularity we considered, our observed distributions of maintenance categories were statistically very highly significantly different from LST. In particular, corrective maintenance was always more than twice the LST value. For the summed data, the percentage of corrective maintenance was more than three times the LST value. We suggest various explanations for the observed differences, including inaccuracies on the part of the maintenance managers who responded to the LST survey.
AB - In 1978, Lientz, Swanson, and Tompkins published the results of a survey on software maintenance. They found that 17.4% of maintenance effort was categorized as corrective in nature, 18.2% as adaptive, 60.3% as perfective, and 4.1% was categorized as other. We refer to this as the "LSI" result. We contrast this survey-based result with our empirical results from the analysis of data for the repeated maintenance of three software products: a commercial real-time product, the Linux kernel, and GCC. For all three products and at both levels of granularity we considered, our observed distributions of maintenance categories were statistically very highly significantly different from LST. In particular, corrective maintenance was always more than twice the LST value. For the summed data, the percentage of corrective maintenance was more than three times the LST value. We suggest various explanations for the observed differences, including inaccuracies on the part of the maintenance managers who responded to the LST survey.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=0141993431&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1023/A:1025368318006
DO - 10.1023/A:1025368318006
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:0141993431
SN - 1382-3256
VL - 8
SP - 351
EP - 365
JO - Empirical Software Engineering
JF - Empirical Software Engineering
IS - 4
ER -