Reducing Maintenance Effort through Software Operation Knowledge: An Eclectic Empirical Evaluation

Knowledge of in-the-field software operation is acquired unsophisticatedly: acquisition processes are implemented ad hoc, application-specific and are only triggered when end-users experience severe failures. Vendors that do acquire such knowledge structurally from their software applications, often are unsuccessful in visualizing it in a consistent and uniform manner. A generic approach to acquisition and presentation of software operation knowledge reduces the time vendors need to integrate acquisition logic into their applications, as well as the time needed to analyze, compare and present uniform software operation data resulting from in-the-field software operation. This paper proposes a technique for software operation knowledge acquisition and presentation through generic recording and visualization of software operation. A prototype tool implementing this technique is presented, as well as an extensive empirical evaluation of the tool using an eclectic set of instruments (an experiment, two case studies and expert focus group discussions) involving three widely-used software applications. Results show that the technique is expected to reduce software maintenance effort and increase comprehension of end-user software operation.