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An Industrial Case Study of Program Artifacts Viewed During Maintenance Tasks

Research on maintenance task structure modeling has so far examined only how often program artifacts are modified, and what information can be deduced from modification records. However, developers often access artifacts that they do not change, and this information is not modeled or recorded by current research systems. In this paper, we describe an exploratory industrial case study that we have conducted to investigate this issue; we found that within a given maintenance task, the software artifacts that are viewed but not changed outnumber the changed artifacts over 10% of the time. We further found that including information about which artifacts were changed and which were only viewed was key to a mature understanding of the tasks that the developers were performing. Finally, we discuss how creating a repository that captures both the viewed-only and modified artifact accesses can yield further insights into the development process, such as how developers handle interruptions and task switching in their workflow