Towards an ontology of software maintenance

We suggest that empirical studies of maintenance are difficult to understan d unless the context of the study is fully defined. We developed a prelimin ary ontology to identify a number of factors that influence maintenance. Th e purpose of the ontology is to identify factors that would affect the resu lts of empirical studies, We present the ontology in the form of a UML mode l. Using the maintenance factors included in the ontology, we define two co mmon maintenance scenarios and consider the industrial issues associated wi th them. Copyright (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.