Understanding and predicting the process of software maintenance releases

One of the major concerns of any maintenance organization is to understand and estimate the cost of maintenance releases of software systems. Planning the next release so as to maximize the increase in functionality and the improvement in quality are vital to successful maintenance management. The objective of the paper is to present the results of a case study in which an incremental approach was used to better understand the effort distribution of releases and build a predictive effort model for software maintenance releases. The study was conducted in the Flight Dynamics Division (FDD) of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). The paper presents three main results: (1) a predictive effort model developed for the FDD's software maintenance release process, (2) measurement-based lessons learned about the maintenance process in the FDD, (3) a set of lessons learned about the establishment of a measurement-based software maintenance improvement program. In addition, this study provides insights and guidelines for obtaining similar results in other maintenance organizations.