Understanding and improving the maintenance process: a method and two case studies

The skill shortage and the increasing dynamism of the global market with the consequent needs for achieving market differentiation, focussing on core competences and reacting faster on changes in the environment, are forcing software enterprises to move towards a virtual organization. Workflow and computer supported cooperative work technologies are a primary enabler for virtual organizations, as distributed teams of software engineers make substantially more use of computer mediated channels than physical presence to interact and cooperate in order to achieve their objectives. A preliminary step for introducing workflow technology into a software organization is comprehending the existing processes with the aim of modeling, analyzing, and redesigning them. This paper illustrates a method to approach the comprehension in a systematic way and discusses key issues and lessons learned from two case studies.