Documenting maintenance tasks using maintenance patterns

A common problem in software maintenance is the lack of documentation required for carrying out the maintenance tasks. Both expected and unexpected maintenance tasks use and produce important information, which is not systematically recorded during the evolution of a system. As a result, maintenance becomes unnecessarily hard. We suggest the use of maintenance patterns to record information about maintenance tasks. Maintenance patterns are organized collections of software elements relevant for a particular maintenance concern. Such a pattern can be exploited for advanced tool support where the tool keeps track and guides the system developer step by step through a maintenance procedure.