An empirical study of software maintenance of a Web-based Java application

This paper presents empirical study detailing software maintenance for Web-based Java applications to aid in understanding and predicting the software maintenance category and effort. The specific application described is a Java Web-based administrative application in the e-Government arena. The application is based on the design of an open source model-view-controller framework. The domain factors, which also provide contextual references, are described based on Kitchenham et al.´s software maintenance ontology. This paper characterizes the number of fault reports and maintenance effort for each maintenance category. This study finds that the distribution of software maintenance effort in this observed Web-based Java application is similar to the distribution in previous software maintenance studies, which analyzed non object-oriented and non Web-based applications.