A case study in object-oriented maintenance

Abstract

Results of a case study in maintenance of an object oriented software application are presented. A software engineer replaced a text based user interface with a graphical user interface (GUI) based on the Microsoft Foundation Classes, adapted the application for the Win32 environment, and corrected faults in the original application. About 94.8% of the maintenance effort was perfective (development of the GUI), 3.2% adaptive and 2.0% corrective. Comparisons are drawn to similar maintenance activities in the literature.