Thesis (M.S.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 1989. / Bibliography; leaves 71-73.

Thesis (M.S.)--Ohio University, 2002. / Title from PDF t.p.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Glasgow, 2008. / Ph.D. thesis submitted to the Department of Computing Science, Faculty of Information and Mathematical Sciences, University of Glasgow, 2008. Includes bibliographical references. Print version also available.

Thesis (M.Eng.) - Carleton University, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 96-98). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (M.S. in Systems Technology (Command, Control and Communications (C3))--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2007. / Thesis Advisor(s): Thomas Housel. "June 2007." Includes bibliographical references (p. 79-82). Also available in print.

Context: Adopting agile practices has proven to be successful for many practitioners both academically and practically in development scenario. But the context of agile practices adoption during software maintenance is partially studied and is mostly focused on benefits. The success factors of agile practices during development cannot be related to maintenance, as maintenance differs in many aspects from development. The context of this research is to study the adoption of different agile practices during software maintenance. Objectives: In this study, an attempt has been made to accomplish the following objectives: Firstly, to identify different agile practices that are adopted in practice during software maintenance. Secondly, identifying advantages and disadvantages of adopting those agile practices during software maintenance. Methods: To accomplish the objectives a case study is conducted at Capgemini, Mumbai, India. Data is collected by conducting two rounds of interviews among five different projects which have adopted agile practices during software maintenance. Close-ended questionnaire and open-ended questionnaires have been used respectively for first and second round interviews. The motivation for selecting different questionnaire is because each round aimed to accomplish different research objectives. Apart from interviews, direct observation of agile practices in each project is done to achieve data triangulation. Finally, a validation survey is conducted among second round interview participants and other practitioners from outside the case study to validate the data collected during second round interviews. Results: A simple literature review identified 30 agile practices adopted during software maintenance. On analyzing first round of interviews 22 practices are identified to be mostly adopted and used during software maintenance. The result of adopting those agile practices are categorized as advantages and disadvantages. In total 12 advantages and 8 disadvantages are identified and validated through second round interviews and validation survey respectively. Finally, a cause-effect relationship is drawn among the identified agile practices and consequences. Conclusions: Adopting agile practices has both positive and negative result. Adopting agile practices during perfective and adaptive type of maintenance has more advantages, but adopting agile practices during corrective type of maintenance may not have that many advantages as compared to other type of maintenance. Hence, one has to consider the type of maintenance work before adopting agile practices during software maintenance.

Software reuse is perceived as the key to successful software development because of the potential for shortened time to market, increased quality and reduced costs. In recent years software product lines have emerged as a promising way to achieve large scale software reuse. Challenges against successful reuse when developing in a software product line involves management of the differences between products, and the differences between different releases of the products. In this thesis we present the experiences from a series of case studies within four software companies. Based on these we present a taxonomy of the technical solutions to manage product differences, a historical essay of how components in a software product line can evolve and what mechanisms that are used to support this evolution. From this we elaborate on the connection between evolution and variability, i.e. the ability of the software architecture and components to support the differences between products. We argue that evolution is strongly connected to variability, and that by foreseeing the evolution, the software can be instrumented with appropriate variability mechanisms accordingly. Moreover, we argue that some types of evolution are more frequent than others, and that the efforts should mainly go in the direction of foreseeing and instrumenting for these types of evolution.

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Programmers are encouraged to comment their source programs, yet the value of the comments is not easily verified. In this study, the relationships between comment quantity and software metrics are assessed to determine whether programmers increase comment quantity in complex modules. In addition, comment quantity and software metrics are related to software maintenance data. It was found that software complexity, as measured by software metrics, accounts for a substantial portion of the variance in comment quantity. Additionally, comment quantity has no statistically significant relationship to software maintainability for the task studied. / Master of Science