Problem management maturity within corrective maintenance

CM3: Problem Management is a first detailed descriptive problem management process model to be utilized within corrective maintenance. It is the result of a long-term empirical study of industrial corrective maintenance processes. It has been developed at ABB and evaluated for its industrial relevance within 17 non-ABB organizations.Playing the role of a descriptive model, CM3: Problem Management specifies what a problem management process should look like. It also structures it into three maturity levels, Initial, Defined, and Optimal, where each level offers a different grainedness of process visibility.In this paper, we present the CM3 levels of problem management process maturity within corrective maintenance and match them against the industrial state of practice. Our goal is to establish the current status of problem management maturity using CM3: Problem Management as an evaluation model. Our evaluation results show that the industrial processes today suffice to attend to software problems within corrective maintenance. Very few of them, however, do learn from the past in order to prevent future problems and to improve development or maintenance processes.

[1]  Thomas M. Pigoski.  Practical Software Maintenance: Best Practices for Managing Your Software Investment , 1996 .

[2]  I. Lee,et al.  On-line recovery for rediscovered software problems , 1996, Proceedings of IEEE International Computer Performance and Dependability Symposium.

[3]  Glenford J. Myers,et al.  Softwear Reliability , 1976 .

[4]  Glenford J. Myers,et al.  Software Reliability: Principles and Practices , 1976 .

[5]  David N. Card,et al.  Learning from Our Mistakes with Defect Causal Analysis , 1999, IEEE Softw..

[6]  Robert G. Mays.  Applications of Defect Prevention in Software Development , 1990, IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun..

[7]  Mira Kajko-Mattsson,et al.  The state of documentation practice within corrective maintenance , 2001, Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance. ICSM 2001.

[8]  Mira Kajko-Mattsson,et al.  Software problem reporting and resolution process at ABB robotics AB: state of practice , 2000 .

[9]  M. Kajko-Mattsson,et al.  Corrective maintenance maturity model (CM/sup 3/): maintainer's education and training , 2001, Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering. ICSE 2001.

[10]  Mira Kajko-Mattsson.  Evaluating CM3: Problem Management , 2002, CAiSE.

[11]  James Martin,et al.  Software Maintenance: The Problem and Its Solutions , 1983 .

[12]  Victor R. Basili,et al.  A change analysis process to characterize software maintenance projects , 1994, Proceedings 1994 International Conference on Software Maintenance.

[13]  Mark C. Paulk,et al.  The Capability Maturity Model: Guidelines for Improving the Software Process , 1994 .

[14]  Ravishankar K. Iyer,et al.  Identifying software problems using symptoms , 1994, Proceedings of IEEE 24th International Symposium on Fault- Tolerant Computing.

[15]  Nazim H. Madhavji.  The Prism model of changes , 1991, [1991 Proceedings] 13th International Conference on Software Engineering.

[16]  Dewayne E. Perry,et al.  A case study in root cause defect analysis , 2000, Proceedings of the 2000 International Conference on Software Engineering. ICSE 2000 the New Millennium.

[17]  A. Hazeyama,et al.  A problem report management system for software maintenance , 1999, IEEE SMC'99 Conference Proceedings. 1999 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (Cat. No.99CH37028).

[18]  Raghu Singh.  ISO/IEC draft international standard 12207, software life-cycle processes , 1994, Methods and Associated Tools for the Information Systems Life Cycle.

[19]  Mira Kajko-Mattsson,et al.  Developing CM3: Maintainers' Education and Training at ABB , 2002, Comput. Sci. Educ..

[20]  Mira Kajko-Mattsson,et al.  A conceptual model of software maintenance , 1998, Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Software Engineering.

[21]  Lowell Jay Arthur.  Software evolution: the software maintenance challenge , 1988 .

[22]  Mira Kajko-Mattsson.  Corrective Maintenance Maturity Model: Problem Management , 2002, International Conference on Software Maintenance, 2002. Proceedings..

[23]  Mira Kajko-Mattsson,et al.  Evaluating the predelivery phase of ISO/IEC FDIS 14764 in the Swedish context , 2001, Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance. ICSM 2001.

[24]  Volker Gruhn,et al.  Software process modeling and enactment: an experience report related to problem tracking in an industrial project , 1998, Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Software Engineering.

[25]  William A. Florac.  Software Quality Measurement: A Framework for Counting Problems and Defects , 1992 .

[26]  Carolyn Seaman,et al.  Practical Software Maintenance , 2000, J. Softw. Maintenance Res. Pract..