Maintenance in joint software development

The need to combine several efforts in software development has become critical because of the software development requirements and geographically dispersed qualified human resources, background skills, working methods, and software tools among autonomous software enterprises - joint software development. We know that the organization and the development of software depend largely on human initiatives. All human initiatives are subject to change and perpetual evolution. A variety of studies have contributed to highlight the problems arising from the change and the perpetual evolution of the software development. These studies revealed that the majority of the effort spent on the software process is spent on maintenance. To reduce the efforts of software maintenance in joint software development, it is therefore necessary to detect the features of software maintenance processes susceptible to be automatized. The software maintenance problems in joint software development are caused by the changes and perpetual evolutions at the organizational level of an enterprise or at the software development level. The complex nature of changes and perpetual evolutions at the organizational and the development levels includes the following factors: the maintenance contracts among enterprises, the abilities to develop, experiences and background in software development, methodologies of software development, tools available and localization of the organizations. This paper looks into the new software maintenance problems in joint software development by geographically dispersed virtual enterprises.