Effects of contextual information on maintenance effort: A controlled experiment

There has been an increased focus on context-aware tools in software engineering. Within this area, an important challenge is to define and model the context for software-development projects and software development in general. This article reports a controlled experiment that compares the effort to implement changes, the correctness and the maintainability of an existing application between two projects; one that uses qualitative dashboards depicting contextual information, and one that does not. The results of this controlled experiment suggest that the usage of qualitative dashboards improves the correctness during the software maintenance activities and reduces the effort to implement these activities. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.