Provenance Support for Rework

Xiang Zhao, Leon Osterweil
Department of Computer Science
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
{xiang,ljo}@cs.umass.edu.edu

Barbara Staudt Lerner
Computer Science Department
Mt. Holyoke College
blerner@mtholyoke.edu

Emery Boose, Aaron Ellison
Harvard Forest, Harvard University
{boose,aellison}@fas.harvard.edu

Abstract

Rework occurs commonly in software development. This paper describes a simple rework example, namely the code refactoring process. We show that contextual information is central to supporting such rework, and we present an artifact provenance support approach that can help developers keep track of previous decisions to im- prove their effectiveness in rework.