An Empirical Investigation on Documentation Usage Patterns in Maintenance Tasks

When developers perform a software maintenance task, they need to identify artifacts-e.g., classes or more specifically methods-that need to be modified. To this aim, they can browse various kind of artifacts, for example use case descriptions, UML diagrams, or source code. This paper reports the results of a study-conducted with 33 participants- aimed at investigating (i) to what extent developers use different kinds of documentation when identifying artifacts to be changed, and (ii) whether they follow specific navigation patterns among different kinds of artifacts. Results indicate that, although participants spent a conspicuous proportion of the available time by focusing on source code, they browse back and forth between source code and either static (class) or dynamic (sequence) diagrams. Less frequently, participants-especially more experienced ones-follow an "integrated" approach by using different kinds of artifacts.