Quality of Evolution session
Alain April, from the École de Technologie Supérieure in Canada, presented the first paper, titled ‘Studying Supply and Demand of Software Maintenance and Evolution Services’. He started by noting that often CIOs don’t have adequate data on productivity and ROI for maintenance activities. While new projects are usually properly planned and budgeted for, maintenance management is often based requests that are estimated to take less than a certain number of person-days to implement, with indicators such as the length of the waiting list or the number of requests handled being the maintenance management tools. Alain argued that instead of using absolute values, internal and external benchmarking should be used to compare maintenance effort of a project with respect to other projects within and outside the organisation, e.g. using the ISBSG data set. Moreover, Alain argued that organizations should adopt the ISO14764 standard categories of maintenance work (adaptive, preventive, corrective, perfective). This would not only allow the IT departments to charge its customers accordingly, but also to track the trend of each type of maintenance work, making clear to management that increased preventive maintenance is needed to decrease corrective maintenance. In other words, this paper looked at simple but effective ways to monitor and communicate the quality of the evolution of maintenance effort.
