On the Benefits of Planning and Grouping Software Maintenance Requests

Despite its unquestionable importance, software maintenance usually has a negative image among software developers and even project managers. As a result, it is common to consider maintenance requests as short-term tasks that should be implemented as quick as possible to have a minimal impact for end-users. In order to promote software maintenance to a first-class software development activity, we first define in this paper a light weighted process -- called PASM (Process for Arranging Software Maintenance Requests) -- for handling maintenance as software projects. Next, we describe an in-depth evaluation of the benefits achieved by the PASM process at a real software development organization. For this purpose, we rely on a set of clustering analysis techniques in order to better understand and compare the requests handled before and after the adoption of the proposed process. Our results indicate that the number of projects created to handle maintenance requests has increased almost three times after this organization has adopted the PASM process. Furthermore, we also concluded that projects based on the PASM present a better balance between the various software engineering activities. For example, after adopting PASM the developers have dedicated more time to analysis and validation and less time to implementation and codification tasks.