A Study of Web Maintenance in an Industrial Setting

In this paper, we explore facets of web maintenance effort for three commercial Web Information Systems. We decompose effort from over four hundred change requests collected post-implementation over a three month period into the three categories of adaptive, corrective and perfective maintenance change types. We explore two research questions. Firstly, the influence or otherwise of a 'ripple' change effect in each of those three categories, secondly, in which of the three architectural layers of the application the majority of maintenance activity was found (i.e., presentation, business logic or data). A ripple effect was found to occur most in the perfective maintenance category and of the three categories, the perfective category was again found to influence the business logic layer in contrast to the other two layers.