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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.
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