Impact of individual, program and organizational characteristics on software maintenance: A human information processing perspective

Software maintenance is generally defined as all activities that change software in order to keep it operational and responsive to user needs. Even though major portions of time and resources are devoted to it, top management, by historically viewing software maintenance as simply the mending of defects in existing systems, has failed to realize that software maintenance is often an "iceberg", with low visibility but high impact potential for success or failure of a system;Empirical evaluation of the software maintenance effort model was conducted through a laboratory experiment. Students from 'C' and Object-Oriented programming courses offered in the College of Business Administration and Department of Computer Science at University of Houston along with professional 'C' programmers were used as subjects for this study. The experiment was designed to investigate the effect of the proposed independent variables (program size, complexity of control flow, modularization, variable name mnemonicity, level of commenting, level of semantic knowledge, time pressure, repair request details, and level of debugging cues) and some of their interactions on maintenance effort. Data was collected using the Program Maintenance Performance Testing System (PROMPTS) designed especially for this experiment.;Overall, the results of the experiment support the predictions made by the propositions generated using the HIP-based model of software maintenance effort and have four implications for the academic and the practitioner communities. (Abstract shortened by UMI.) ftn;A number of studies have examined various factors that affect the magnitude of the software maintenance effort in order to find ways to reduce it. Although many factors affecting this effort have been identified (e.g., program size and programmer experience), little progress has been made toward developing a theoretical model that describes their impact on software maintenance effort. In an effort to address this need, this study (a) describes the development of a model of software maintenance effort...