System structure and software maintenance performance
Communications of the ACM
On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules
Communications of the ACM
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Researchers must pay far more attention to discoveringand validating the principles that underlie software maintenanceand evolution. This was one of the major conclusions reachedduring the International Workshop on Empirical Studies of SoftwareMaintenance. This workshop, held in November 1996 in Monterey,California, brought together an international group of researchersto discuss the successes, challenges and open issues in softwaremaintenance and evolution.This article documentsthe discussion of the subgroup on fundamental laws and assumptionsof software maintenance. The participants of this group includedresearchers in software engineering, the behavioral sciences,information systems and statistics. Their main conclusion wasthat insufficient effort has been paid to synthesizing researchconjectures into validated theories and that this problem hasslowed progress in software maintenance. To help support thisvision they identified the following supporting conclusions.(1) need to develop a genuine scientific approach—morethan just using empirical methods, (2) other disciplines canhelp, (3) need to explore a wider range of approaches to empiricalstudies, (4) need to study both evolution and maintenance.