An examination of software maintenance practices in a U.S. government organization

In an effort to find out more about the effectiveness of the tools, procedures, and techniques that project personnel use in their work, the Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE) Environments project at the Software Engineering Institute interviewed personnel in eight software maintenance projects within a U.S. Government organization. These interviews highlighted problems that we believe are typical of many software maintenance organizations and are the subject of this paper. While the interviews discovered a need for maintenance tools to support such areas as reverse-engineering and regression testing, these problems often had their roots in deeper issues. Such issues were a lack of design for maintenance, ineffective communication and low status of maintenance work. This paper addresses these deeper issues and suggests some approaches for their resolution.