Improving Software Maintenance Processes

Goal

Characterize, evaluate, and improve software maintenance processes and software maintenance organizations. Our research has focused on software mainteance in the NASA SEL environment.

Status

An auditing methodology specifically aimed at analyzing software maintenance processes and organizations was developed and experimentally validated [ICSM94, JSM].
A software maintenance organization modeling technique based on the actor-dependency model was proposed. This technique allows us to capture numerous kinds of constraints and dependencies frequently encountered in complex software maintenance organizations. This technique proved also to be intuitive and to facilitate communication with the maintenance staff of the studied organization [ICSE17].
A measurement program specifically aimed at maintenance has been introduced in the NASA SEL software maintenance organization. Based on the data collected, release productivity models have been built [CS-TR-3502].

Future Work

Experience Factory for Maintenance.
Provide cost, resource and effort maintenance models based on the data we have been collecting using SEL's recently installed software maintenance measurement program.

Information flow analysis
Provide an analysis of information flow and how it is affected by the maintenance organizational structure, including identification of specific improvements to the organization and process to facilitate information flow.