What About Maintenance Projects?

What is a maintenance project?
A project is termed a maintenance project if it involves performing work on an existing product. There can be three reasons for changing an existing product:

  • Eliminating errors
  • Performing functional changes (extensions, adaptations)
  • Performing non-functional changes (porting, optimizations).

Virtually all maintenance projects are dealt with using the evolutionary development model. Each shipment results in a new product version (following error elimination and/or incorporation of change requests or optimizations). Since a maintenance project is always based on an existing product, the software code is accompanied by documents generated during earlier versions.

What are the typical operations in the Initiation phase?

  • The project management type must be specified in order to ensure that the necessary resources and project staff are available. Will the maintenance work be carried out in a single block of work, distributed on an ongoing basis (with what level of utilization?) or upon request as required? What response time is required for error messages and change requests?
  • If the project is taken over from an earlier project team, it is important to clarify which documents, sources and SW/HW (possibly with licenses) have been created by that team and can be reused. Is a competent contact person available if questions or problems which have their roots in the former development team arise during the course of the maintenance work?
  • The creation/extension of a regression test (automatic or with existing test case lists) must be scheduled for checking functions which have not been changed.

Siemens AG Österreich, Program and Systems Engineering PSE
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Last modified: 08/27/98 15:41
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