期刊名称：International Journal of Soft Computing and Software Engineering
电子版ISSN：2251-7545
出版年度：2013
卷号：3
期号：3
页码：131-136
DOI：10.7321/jscse.v3.n3.21
出版社：Advance Academic Publisher
摘要：Software is developed with prior requirements and it is maintained continuously with rapid progresses in domain, technology, economy and other fields. The core activity of maintenance is code change, which changes the code to remove a bug or add new functionality. Maintenance projects contain an unstructured code due to patched and repatched software while addressing successive customer issues. Change in unstructured code without proper test coverage is a risky job. Software maintenance process slowdowns due to lack of proper test suite. Software maintenance process can also be affected due to staff turnover, low team morale, poor visibility, complexity of maintenance projects and lack of communication techniques among stakeholders. On the other hand, Extreme Programming (XP) practices such as Test Driven Development (TDD), refactoring, pair programming and collective ownership can overcome some of the challenges of maintenance up to some extent for non-XP projects. In this paper, an integrated code change approach is proposed for software maintenance using XP practices such as TDD, refactoring and pair programming. The proposed approach uses RC story, production code and test code of existing system during code change. The proposed approach is validated by applying it on several academic projects of software maintenance. It is observed that the proposed approach provides higher quality code in terms of the structure, correctness, robustness and maintainability hence improving software design. The XP practices based approach enhances both learning and productivity of the work by improving courage, team morale and confidence to support higher motivation in code change. In order to improve proposed approach, this experiment can be replicated in future to collect more data and to validate the observations.
