Contributors to quality during software maintenance

摘要

Software maintenance is a costly, yet often neglected part of the development life-cycle. This study evaluates factors that contribute to quality during maintenance. Quality is measured as quality of application maintenance, overall application quality during maintenance, and quality of maintenance changes. Quality is also measured objectively as number of failures and defects per month. The findings of this study indicate that design for maintainability in software development positively impacts quality during the maintenance phase of the life-cycle. The relationship and coordination between maintainers and users is also a key quality factor. Reuse within an application and from other applications also positively impacts quality, as do the structured design techniques of independence and consistency of data elements. The use of a structured methodology was found to reduce code and design defects in large applications. CASE tools, however, showed no significant impacts on any of the quality metrics in this study. Surprisingly, the technical expertise of the software maintenance team and the business expertise of the users showed a negative quality impact, possibly due to the respondents of the study incorrectly identifying experts or fully understanding expertise. User controlled data tables also showed a negative impact on overall maintenance quality. These results indicate that a well designed application combined with a strong maintainer–user bond can result in quality software maintenance.