Extreme maintenance

This paper examines some of the problems experienced by IONA Technology Orbix Generation 3 maintenance and enhancement team and how the adoption of Extreme Programming has further improved the team's ability to deliver quality support and enhancements to the products they work on. The issues identified and discussed are common issues for companies moving from the startup pressures of time to market to those related to supporting large numbers of customers with bug fixes and enhancements to existing applications in existing deployment scenarios. The paper briefly reviews the history of the teams development and maintenance practices prior to the implementation of the Extreme Programming practices. It then focuses on how Extreme Programming was implemented and used to resolve some of the identified problems. Results are detailed as both a qualitative view on the Extreme Programming project and the impacts on morale along with some of the quantitative analysis related to productivity and customer satisfaction. This experience has shown that Extreme programming is a viable and very successful model for teams involved in pure maintenance and enhancement of a legacy code base.