Source code changes can have ripple-effects that result in unchanged source code elements producing different results than they would have produced before the changes. This paper proposes a taxonomy of the types of impacts that can result from source ...

Software maintenance history is a chronological record of significant maintenance events. It provides high level knowledge to software stakeholders, helps them to make important decisions. Unfortunately, retrieving software maintenance history is a ...

Correct real-time behavior is an important aspect for time sensitive software, but it is difficult to get right. Time faults can be introduced not just during software development but also maintenance. So software maintainers without time information ...

The fact that software ages holds for embedded automotive software as well as for any other kind of software. In comparison to IT software, the automotive domain has to deal with different kinds of requirements, such as real time properties, feedback ...

In this paper we present a maintainability based model for estimating the costs of developing source code in its evolution phase. Our model adopts the concept of entropy in thermodynamics, which is used to measure the disorder of a system. In our model, ...

Code smells are manifestations of design flaws that can degrade code maintainability. As such, the existence of code smells seems an ideal indicator for maintainability assessments. However, to achieve comprehensive and accurate evaluations based on ...

Advocates of requirements traceability regularly cite advantages like easier program comprehension and support for software maintenance (i.e., software change). However, despite its growing popularity, there exists no published evaluation about the ...

Change impact analysis techniques estimate the potential effects of changes made to software. Directed Incremental Symbolic Execution (DiSE) is an intraprocedural technique for characterizing the impact of software changes on program behaviors. DiSE ...

Unit testing represents a key activity in software development and maintenance. Test suites with high internal quality facilitate maintenance activities, such as code comprehension and regression testing. Several guidelines have been proposed to help ...