Don’t risk losing your competitive edge by allowing maintenance improvement to lag behind development. Stay ahead of the curve by following this detailed action plan for success!

It can be tempting to cut corners in the race to develop software, particularly when trying to negotiate the hairpin turn of software maintenance. The value of software maintenance process improvement has been difficult to define over the years, but new initiatives and technologies are being developed to make software maintenance teams more efficient, cohesive, and productive. Recent innovations in this arena and an intensified focus on improving software products across the technology industry are increasingly putting maintenance under an unfamiliar spotlight.
Leaders in the software maintenance field are focusing on three key approaches to improving their processes:
1. Examining traditionally neglected management and workflow structures, which often are simply borrowed from software development, and reworking them specifically for application with their maintenance teams.
2. Developing mechanisms that can diagnose code errors and regulate and simplify languages in order to alleviate much of the maintenance burden.
3. Capitalizing on the intensified focus on the need for improvement of software products that is resulting in a renewed awareness about the need for quality maintenance.
Addressing maintenance can help companies to conserve valuable resources of time, energy, and money, asserts Alain April, professor of software engineering at the University of Quebec and coauthor with Alain Abran of the recently published Software Maintenance Management: Evaluation and Continuous Improvement. “If you get an edge in this area, you will get an edge in your market,” says April. “If you don’t do this right, you’re going to destabilize yourself. You will have to do a major rework or a major redesign that will cost a lot of money.”

#1: Addressing Maintenance Management Structure
The traditional role of software maintenance has been to check on the software development team, diagnosing problems and identifying areas where improvement may be needed. Yet despite holding this critical responsibility, maintenance teams are often regarded as less vital to the success of a project than their development counterparts.
“They’re really the ‘blue collar’ of the industry,” says April. The achievements of maintenance aren’t met with the fanfare of successful developments, and as a result, maintenance technicians often feel unappreciated and may develop an unwillingness to continue dedicating their time and effort to the process for others to reap the benefits and recognition of their work. “You end up with a situation where these people don’t want to stay, and this could mean a lot of valuable knowledge walking out the door,” April adds.
To remedy this situation, leaders need to research management and maintenance techniques and consider appropriate structures that they can adapt specifically for application with their maintenance teams, making processes easier for the department by facilitating better documentation and smoother workflow. Simply borrowing from software development techniques is an approach that is wrought with potential dangers. It is necessary to develop an actionable set of directives and improvements that maintenance managers can present to chief information officers and other executives in such a way that they can understand and support.

#2: Streamlining Processes with Effective Tools
Another key approach for companies is to develop or identify and implement effective tools for supplementing their identified theoretical approach to process improvement. One available industry option for such a tool that has been gaining attention recently is the Application Intelligence Platform (AIP) 6.1, the latest version of the automated code inspection system provided by CAST. The French company, which has North American headquarters in New York, markets a system that’s designed to streamline the software maintenance process

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