Maintenance

Software maintenance is not like hardware maintenance, which is the return of the item to its original state. Software maintenance involves moving an item away from its original state.

Software maintenance encompasses all activities associated with the process of changing software. That includes everything associated with “bug fixes,” functional and performance enhancements, providing backward compatibility and covering up hardware errors, creating user-interface access methods and other cosmetic changes, and updating to use a new algorithm.

In software, adding a six-lane automobile expressway to a railroad bridge is considered maintenance—and it would be particularly good if you could do it without stopping the train traffic.

Most companies now find that retiring an existing software product is nearly impossible. To build a replacement, you need requirements that match the product's current version, and they probably don't exist! They're not in the documentation, because it wasn't kept up to date. You won't get them from the original customers, users, or developers, because those folks are long gone …

Drawing on extensive data from the NASA Space Shuttle's guidance software, Schneidewind … provides several formulas for tracking maintenance stability defined as increasing functionality with decreasing failures…

If this decade's mantra is 'show me the money,' those of us in software will find it in maintenance. Life-cycle data shows that maintenance is where we spend the biggest chunk of practitioner time and money.

Risk management in maintenance differs in major ways from risk management in development. Risk opportunities are more frequent, risks come from more diverse sources, and projects have less freedom to act on them.

Maintenance plays a vital role in protecting quality as a system evolves.

An effective way to improve software quality is to set measurable goals and then manage your projects to achieve those goals. Hewlett-Packard has developed some methods to do just that.

…arguing about the definition of software maintenance seldom leads to maintenance advances…

Domain-specific modeling (DSM) languages have been adopted in many industries, but these languages haven't yet gained wide acceptance in practice. This is because the claims of increased productivity and ease of understanding haven't been verified by independent studies. To address this concern, this article compares the maintenance performance of the Enterprise Mobile Application DSM (EMADSM) language and UML. Maintenance in software-intensive systems is critical because software often continuously evolves not only during development but also after delivery, to meet users' ever-changing needs. So, maintenance performance significantly impacts software development productivity. Study results show that maintenance is significantly easier and faster with EMADSM than with UML. This finding has considerable implications for companies that maintain evolving systems.

With the increasing importance, size, and complexity of automated test suites, the need exists for suitable methods and tools to develop, assess the quality of, and maintain test code (scripts) in parallel with regular production (application) code.

Object orientation facilitates change but makes programs harder for maintainers to understand. … The appearance and organization of OO [object-oriented] code may startle may programmers.