Supporting long-term collaboration in software maintenance

The maintenance of large software systems is a collaborative activity requiring the combined efforts of a team of maintenance engineers. Due to the extended time period over which maintenance occurs, direct communication between these team members is however, difficult or impossible. This paper presents a system which supports long-term collaboration in software maintenance by allowing maintenance rationale to be captured and shared by maintenance engineers. The system concentrates on the construction of maintenance rationale by providing a range of unconstrained documentation facilities. The general model adopted exploits hypertext technology to allow rationale to be integrated into the system by attaching comments to the appropriate source component.