Making Change: The *Other* Components of Software Maintenance

Abstract

As we maintain systems and build new ones, we have to make decisions about when to use old technology and when to adopt new ones. Especially when using components, we must decide when to use an old one whole, when to modify it, and when to create a new one. In this talk, I will look at such changes in the larger context of how we make decisions about adopting new technology. We will see that the decision-making must involve information in three arenas: technological, organizational and evidential. That is, we must know not only about the contrast between the old and new technologies, but also about the characteristics of the receiving organization, and the credibility of the evidence that the new technology is an improvement over the old.