The Information Gathering Strategies of Software Maintainers

In examining software maintenance processes for improvement opportunities, an obvious choice is information flow. Obtaining accurate, up-to-date, and useful information about a system being maintained is a major task. It is also a difficult task because the sources of this information are often limited, inaccessible, or unknown. Clearly this impacts maintenance productivity simply because of the time it takes to find and use the appropriate information sources as well as the quality of system changes, which depends on the quality of the system information available. This paper describes the results of a survey study that aims to discover the information gathering strategies that software maintainers employ. The survey was completed by 45 software professionals in two different organizations with varying degrees of experience in maintenance. Their responses, on the surface, simply show that maintainers overwhelmingly rely on source code, which is not surprising. However, a deeper analysis of the responses show that other sources of information, in particular human sources, some types of CASE support, and lessons learned recorded from previous projects are at least as valuable than source code under some conditions. The results of this ongoing survey study are meant to determine a set of hypotheses about information gathering strategies, which will then be empirically evaluated in future studies.