Characterizing and Assessing a Large-Scale Software Maintenance Organization

by

L. Briand, W. L. Melo, C. Seaman, and V. Basili
Published in the Proc. of the 17th Int'l Conf. on Software Engineering, Seattle, WA, April 24-28, 1995.

Abstract:

One important component of a software process is the organizational context in which the process is enacted. This component is often missing or incomplete in current process modeling approaches. One technique for modeling this perspective is the Actor-Dependency (AD) Model. This paper reports on a case study which used this approach to analyze and assess a large software maintenance organization. Our goal was to identify the approach's strengths and weaknesses while providing practical recommendations for improvement and research directions. The AD model was found to be very useful in capturing the important properties of the organizational context of the maintenance process, and aided in the understanding of the flaws found in this process. However, a number of opportunities for extending and improving the AD model were identified. Among others, there is a need to incorporate quantitative information to complement the qualitative model.
Copyright 1995 IEEE. Published in the Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE-17), April 24-28, 1995, Seattle, WA. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works, must be obtained from the IEEE.

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Last updated on March 30, 1999 by Walcélio Melo