Every Maintenance Has Its Exemplar: The Future of Software Maintenance through Migration
Zirui Chen, Xing Hu, Xin Xia, Xiaohu Yang

TL;DR
This paper presents a systematic research agenda for migration-based software maintenance, emphasizing its potential to automate and improve maintenance tasks by transferring knowledge across systems.
Contribution
It introduces the first comprehensive framework outlining the migration-based maintenance lifecycle and highlights key challenges at each stage for future research.
Findings
Migration approaches effectively transfer knowledge between systems.
Four key stages define the migration-based maintenance lifecycle.
Identifies challenges in source selection, data matching, adaptation, and validation.
Abstract
Maintenance is a critical stage in the software lifecycle, ensuring that post-release systems remain reliable, efficient, and adaptable. However, manual software maintenance is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and error-prone, which highlights the urgent need for automation. Learning from maintenance activities conducted on other software systems offers an effective way to improve efficiency. In particular, recent research has demonstrated that migration-based approaches transfer knowledge, artifacts, or solutions from one system to another and show strong potential in tasks such as API evolution adaptation, software testing, and migrating patches for fault correction. This makes migration-based maintenance a valuable research direction for advancing automated maintenance. This paper takes a step further by presenting the first systematic research agenda on migration-based approaches…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSoftware System Performance and Reliability · Software Testing and Debugging Techniques · Software Engineering Research
