Relationships between documentation and maintenance activities

This work describes a controlled experiment comparing maintenance processes derived from two different paradigms: Quick Fix (QF) and Iterative Enhancement (IE). The experiment aimed to ascertain to what extent the quality of the maintenance process is affected by the ease of comprehension of the programs and, vice versa, how far the process influences the quality of the system. It would seem that the documentation does help to understand the system provided it is used correctly; otherwise, it can render the maintenance process even more failure-prone. The experiment demonstrates that the QF results in lesser completeness and traceability than the IE, thus damaging the comprehensibility of the system more than IE; in any case the ease of comprehension must be safeguarded after maintenance, as even IE is not entirely free from harmful effects