Access Type

Open Access Thesis

Date of Award

January 2014

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.S.

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Václav Rajlich

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to perform an empirical study comparing programmers completing software changes assisted by the recently published software process Phased Model for Software Change (PMSC) to those completing software changes without any assistance. There have been numerous researches on software change, but most of them focused more on individual phases of the software change process in lieu of the software change process as a whole. For that reason, this thesis explores the impact of the PMSC process on programmers' performance. The subjects of this study are graduate students with different level of experience.

The results of the experiment show that following the PMSC process improves the performance of both less experienced and more experienced programmers by reducing the amount of time spent to complete software changes by about half. This improvement is noticeable in both code analysis and code implementation activities. We also talk about ways to refine PMSC.

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