Characterizing Software Maintenance Meetings: Information Shared, Discussion Outcomes, and Information Captured

A type of meeting that has been understudied in the software engineering literature to date is what we term the software maintenance meeting: a regularly scheduled team meeting in which emergent issues are addressed that are usually out of scope of the daily stand-up but not necessarily challenging enough to warrant an entirely separate meeting. These meetings tend to discuss a wide variety of topics and are crucial in keeping software development projects going, but little is known about these meetings and how they proceed. In this paper, we report on a single exploratory case study in which we analyzed ten consecutive maintenance meetings from a major healthcare software provider. We analyzed what kind of information is brought into the discussions held in these meetings and how, what outcomes arose from the discussions, and what information was captured for downstream use. Our findings are varied, giving rise to both practical considerations for those conducting these kinds of meetings and new research directions toward further understanding and supporting them.