On The Gap Between Software Maintenance Theory and Practitioners' Approaches

TL;DR

This paper investigates the disconnect between software maintenance research and industry practice through a survey, revealing significant gaps especially in change impact analysis and metrics.

Contribution

It provides empirical data on practitioners' understanding and application of maintenance techniques, highlighting areas where research and practice diverge.

Findings

Large gap in change impact analysis understanding

Significant differences in software metrics application

Practitioners less familiar with research proposals

Abstract

The way practitioners perform maintenance tasks in practice is little known by researchers. In turn, practitioners are not always up to date with the proposals provided by the research community. This work investigates the gap between software maintenance techniques proposed by the research community and the software maintenance practice. We carried out a survey with 112 practitioners from 92 companies and 12 countries. We concentrate on analyzing if and how practitioners understand and apply the following subjects: bad smells, refactoring, software metrics, and change impact analysis. This study shows that there is a large gap between research approaches and industry practice in those subjects, especially in change impact analysis and software metrics.