Methodologies and Software Maintenance

Abstract

There are a multitude of information systems methodologies available to practitioners to aid them in the development of new sytstems. In contrast, however, there are very few information systems methodologies aimed specifically at software maintenance, and of the systems development methodologies few pay much attention to software maintenance. This paper is based on case studies in 31 UK IT departments. The research reported in this paper aimed to uncover how information systems methodologies are applied to software maintenance in current practice. The different approaches to applying methodologies to software maintenance are examined together with the reasons for and against using such approaches. Overall methodologies were found to be applied with less rigour and less consistency in software maintenance than in software development. In addition, government and academic initiatives to improve the software maintenance process such as TickiT and the SEI process maturity model appeared to have made little impact on the organizations studied.