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Understanding documentation value in software maintenance

Published: 30 March 2007 Publication History

Abstract

This study examines effective documentation use in software maintenance. Interviews with software maintainers, with diverse levels of experience, revealed three themes: reliance on source code, characteristics of useful documents, and the interplay between people in the maintenance environment and documentation. All of these findings improve our understanding of the role of documentation in maintenance. This awareness has practical import - project managers can fund the most useful forms of documentation and maintainers can improve their ability to locate and reuse this information.

References

[1]
Allen, Thomas J. (1977). Managing the Flow of Technology, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
[2]
Dekleva, S. M. (1992). Software Maintenance: 1990 Status. Software Maintenance: Research and Practice, 4(4), 233--247.
[3]
C. B. Seaman. (2002). The Information Gathering Strategies of Software Maintainers, Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance, IEEE Press.
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J. Singer. (1998). Work Practices of Software Maintenance Engineers, Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance, IEEE Press, 139--145.
[5]
Sousa, M. J. C., & Moreira, H. M. (1998). A Survey on the Software Maintenance Process. Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance, 265--274.
[6]
Tjortjis, C., & Layzell, P. (2001). Expert Maintainers' Strategies and Needs when Understanding Software: A Case Study Approach. Proceedings of the IEEE 8th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC), 281--287.

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  • (2025)Foundations of Practice: An Ethnographic Exploration of Software Documentation and its Cultural Implications for an Agile StartupEthnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings10.1111/epic.122102024:1(378-396)Online publication date: 10-Feb-2025
  • (2022)X-SBR: On the Use of the History of Refactorings for Explainable Search-Based Refactoring and Intelligent Change OperatorsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2021.310503748:10(3753-3770)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2022
  • (2021)Technical Debt in Large-Scale Distributed Projects: An Industrial Case Study2021 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER50967.2021.00071(590-594)Online publication date: Mar-2021
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHIMIT '07: Proceedings of the 2007 symposium on Computer human interaction for the management of information technology
    March 2007
    124 pages
    ISBN:9781595936356
    DOI:10.1145/1234772
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 30 March 2007

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    Author Tags

    1. documentation
    2. software maintenance

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    CHIMIT '07 Paper Acceptance Rate 11 of 34 submissions, 32%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 15 of 43 submissions, 35%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2025)Foundations of Practice: An Ethnographic Exploration of Software Documentation and its Cultural Implications for an Agile StartupEthnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings10.1111/epic.122102024:1(378-396)Online publication date: 10-Feb-2025
    • (2022)X-SBR: On the Use of the History of Refactorings for Explainable Search-Based Refactoring and Intelligent Change OperatorsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2021.310503748:10(3753-3770)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2022
    • (2021)Technical Debt in Large-Scale Distributed Projects: An Industrial Case Study2021 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER50967.2021.00071(590-594)Online publication date: Mar-2021
    • (2021)Intelligent Change Operators for Multi-Objective Refactoring2021 36th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)10.1109/ASE51524.2021.9678519(768-780)Online publication date: Nov-2021
    • (2021)Beyond Hard and Soft OR: operational research from a software engineering perspectiveJournal of the Operational Research Society10.1080/01605682.2020.186584873:4(693-715)Online publication date: 11-Feb-2021
    • (2018)Applying pattern-driven maintenanceProceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1145/3239235.3268924(1-10)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2018
    • (2016)How do software development teams manage technical debt? - An empirical studyJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2016.05.018120:C(195-218)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2016
    • (2015)Cost, benefits and quality of software development documentationJournal of Systems and Software10.1016/j.jss.2014.09.04299:C(175-198)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2015
    • (2015)Usage and usefulness of technical software documentation: An industrial case studyInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2014.08.00357(664-682)Online publication date: Jan-2015
    • (2010)Software quality evaluation through maintenance processesProceedings of the European conference of systems, and European conference of circuits technology and devices, and European conference of communications, and European conference on Computer science10.5555/1961414.1961436(131-134)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2010
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