The evolution of system reliability depends on its structure as well as on the evolution of its components reliability. The latter is a function of component age during a system’s operating life. Component aging is strongly affected by maintenance activities performed on the system. In this work, we consider two categories of maintenance activities: corrective maintenance (CM) and preventive ma...

The term software evolution is often inappropriately used to mean any type of software change. Cynics could argue that, given the current business dismay with expensive and inflexible software, the area of software evolution is more likely to attract research funding than some of the more established research areas now adopting the ‘evolutionary banner’. However, there is an important conceptua...

Computer-supported annotation of software systems and their documentation, including design documentation and source code, is a common and important software engineering activity. Annotated documentation is used in both formal software inspection and informal software maintenance. Viewers of annotated systems may understand the software more easily if annotations are visible not just from the a...

FEUP presents a departmental structure, composed of six areas, Civil Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computers, Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Management, Mining Engineering, Metallurgical Engineering and Materials. To support the activities of these departments and of the Faculty as a whole there are several central services, including the Computer Centre, ...

Inspection is one of the most common sorts of review practices in software projects. However, there are some controversial reports about the efficiencies of software inspections. In this paper, we perform an empirical study to analyze the efficiencies of code inspections in both software development and software maintenance. The study is performed on 650 NASA SEL inspection records. Similar res...

To meet increasing needs in the field of maintenance, we studied the dynamic aspect of process and services on a maintenance platform, a major challenge in process mining and knowledge engineering. Hence, we propose a dynamic experience feedback approach to exploit maintenance process behaviors in real execution of the maintenance platform. An active learning process exploiting event log is int...

[Context and motivation] It is desirable that requirement engineering methods are reliable, that is, that methods can be repeated with the same results. Risk assessments methods, however, often have low reliability when they identify risk mitigations for a system based on expert judgement. [Question/problem] Our goal is to assess the reliability of an availability risk assessment method for tel...

We will show in this article how Tempo, a process-centered software engineering environment (SEE), assists in cooperative work by means of an approach based on a communication model. We will describe the executable formalisme used to define software engineering activities, and we will show how contraints related to the use of objects in these activities are expressed using the role concept. We ...

Ontology evolution is a complex problem. In our work, we focus on issues related to change management, particularly consistency maintenance and we present in this paper, an overview of Change Management Patterns (CMP) that we have defined to model the three dimensions change, inconsistency and resolution alternative. Modelling these patterns and the links between them, helps to propose an autom...

Inn aa system maintainedd over aa longg time period, as is the case for legacy software, there will be many unknownn andd non-trivial relationships amongg components. Findingg suchh hiddenn relationships may helpp software engineers inn their maintenance activities. Inn this paper we present ann approachh whereby we mine software update records too findd relationships betweenn files that are ch...