Brian On Software

In my last semester at university, I had the opportunity to attend a graduate class dealing with software maintenance, taught by Professor Alain April. In case you don’t know who he is, Dr. April is responsible for creating the Software Maintenance Maturity Model (S3M). Here’s an overview of that model :

We address the assessment and improvement of the software maintenance function by proposing a maturity model for daily software maintenance activities: the Software Maintenance Maturity Model (SMmm). The software maintenance function suffers from a scarcity of management models to facilitate its evaluation, management, and continuous improvement. The SMmm addresses the unique activities of software maintenance while preserving a structure similar to that of the Capability Maturity Model integration (CMMi). It is designed to be used as a complement to that model. The SMmm is based on practitioners’ experience, international standards, and the seminal literature on software maintenance.

Coming back to the subject of this post, we had to choose a subject amongst a list of proposed subjects which would be our project for the whole semester. I decided to write a paper on my personal recommendations for improving the ISO 14764, a software engineering standard which deals with the area of software maintenance.

The objectives of this paper are twofold :

1. Identify books and articles that discuss software maintenance and have been published since 2005;
2. Provide insights or areas for improvement that could contribute to update the upcoming version of the maintenance chapter of the Guide to the SWEBOK (ISO 19760) and to the ISO 14764 standard.

My recommendations were constituted of four different ideas which could improve the area of software maintenance within an organization which deals with software maintenance (and development). Here’s an overview of the ideas I present in this paper :

1. Instilling a quality mindset to top-level management
2. Introducing agile practices in software maintenance
3. Applying key domain-driven design concepts
4. Adopting a universal coding convention throughout the organization

I have archived both the report (PDF) and the PowerPoint slide that I showed during my presentation in class (some slides have notes associated to them for more understanding, in case you don’t want to read the whole report).

Click here to download the paper and the PowerPoint slides (zip file).

I hope this kind of information will help your organization to improve its software maintenance phase. Keep in mind, that these ideas can also be applied for software development activities, not just maintenance.