Supervisory attitudes are equally distributed among favorable, neutral, and
unfavorable. This is not found to be true in the actual workplace. There has
been research done & findings have proved this null hypothesis wrong. This
is because the supervisor may tend to like people who follow his approach towards
software development. For eample, a supervisor might like coders who come u[[
with very few lines of coding because he thinks this is the best way of coding.
Supervisory attitudes cluster in the neutral area with the non neutral attitudes
expressed less frequently. This has been proven wrong in the survey, however
this could be true if the supervisor wants to internal conflicts within his
team then he would be inclined to take the neutral stand.
Supervisory attitudes have the same distribution whether documentation is
regarded as a problem by the supervisors. In smaller organisations, with
smaller teams documentation might not be considered so important by the supervisors
as they generally share a closer interaction with their team than in larger
organisations. However if the supervisor are very involved with the team, documentaion
might be followed very rigidly.
The average age of a software being maintained has no relationship with
supervisory attitudes. This could be true as the older supervisors would
feel more comfortable using older softwares and also they might be reluctant
to change and hence continue with their old software thus increasing the age
of the software. This hypothesis has however been found to be incorrect by Ned
Chapin in his survey.
The Average size of the software program being maintained has no relation
with supervisory attitudes. The size of the software should not be dependent
on the attitudes of the supervisor. Also the requirement of documenting need
not determine the size of a software program.
The proportion of corrective maintenance done has no relationship with supervisory
attitudes. This hypothesis is also proved to be wrong and I agree with it
as corrective maintenance depends solely on the number of errors found in the
code and hence supervisory attitude cannot decide the degree of corrective maintenance
that is done.
The experience level of the personnel doing maintenance has no relationship
with supervisory attitudes. The supervisory attitude and experience level
of the personnel doing maintenance work can be related if the team doing maintenance
is more experienced, as they can influence the supervisory decision about the
kind of maintenance that is done.
