From: Jurgen Vinju To: Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 13:09:56 +0100 Subject: PEM: Frank Niessink (VU Amsterdam) | Perspectives on Improving Software Maintenance | 30.09.99 From: pem (PEM moderator) To: pem-noreply Subject: PEM meeting | 30.09.99 | M2.80, CWI Precedence: bulk X-url: http://www.cwi.nl/~pem Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Dear Environmentalists, This week Frank Niessink of the VU will tell us how they think Software Maintenance can be improved. This talk will be on the regularly scheduled time of 10 AM on a Thursday at the CWI building. This announcement can be found at Perspectives on Improving Software Maintenance Date: 30.09.99 Time: 10:00 Venue: M2.80, CWI Speaker: Frank Niessink (VU Amsterdam) Title: Perspectives on Improving Software Maintenance Generally, two approaches to software process improvement are distinguished. One is the bottom-up, goal-based, measurement-based perspective. In this case, organizations improve themselves by selecting problems or goals, gathering relevant information, deciding on the best course of action, and implementing the solution. The Goal-Question-Metric paradigm is the best known method in this category. The second perspective on process improvement is formed by top-down, assessment-based, maturity-based approaches. In this case, organizations use an external reference framework which is assumed to contain the `right' activities for the organization. By comparing the organization with the framework, directions for improvement are determined. The Software Capability Maturity Model is the best known maturity model. In this talk, we discuss how both perspectives on process improvement apply to improving software maintenance processes. We discuss the measurement perspective by means of four measurement program case studies. The lessons learned from those case studies were captured in a growth model for software measurement processes. We compare this model with other guidelines for software measurement from the literature. From this comparison we conclude that most guidelines concentrate on the measurement-side, and pay hardly any attention to the activities needed for successful application of measurement results, i.e. the improvement-side. From common uses of measurement programs, we derive a number of success factors aimed at the application of measurement results that complement the well-known consensus success factors for software measurement programs. With respect to the maturity perspective on software maintenance, we discuss the nature of software maintenance, viewed from a service perspective. We argue that software maintenance can be seen as providing a service to customers, as opposed to software development, which is concerned with product development. The differences between services and products cause a need for different processes to deliver high quality software maintenance than present in current maturity models for software development. We present an overview of a maturity model aimed at overcoming these differences. This service maturity model was applied in two process assessment case studies. _________________________________________________________________ The programming environment meetings are a forum for the presentation and discussion of new ideas, ongoing and finished work. A typical meeting addresses a subject in the area of programming environments, program generation, algebraic specification, term rewriting, parsing, etc. A presentation ideally takes between 45 and 90 minutes. Meetings taking longer than 45 minutes are interrupted by a coffeebreak. Most Thursdays, a meeting is held which starts at 10:00 am. in one of the rooms at CWI/WINS. Exceptionally, dates or times may change. The program of the meetings is available on WWW: http://www.cwi.nl/~pem _________________________________________________________________