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Problems in application software maintenance

Authors:

Bennet P. Lientz,

E. Burton SwansonAuthors Info & Claims

Communications of the ACM, Volume 24, Issue 11

Pages 763 - 769

https://doi.org/10.1145/358790.358796

Published: 01 November 1981 Publication History

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Abstract

The problems of application software maintenance in 487 data processing organizations were surveyed. Factor analysis resulted in the identification of six problem factors: user knowledge, programmer effectiveness, product quality, programmer time availability, machine requirements, and system reliability. User knowledge accounted for about 60 percent of the common problem variance, providing new evidence of the importance of the user relationship for system success or failure. Problems of programmer effectiveness and product quality were greater for older and larger systems and where more effort was spent in corrective maintenance. Larger scale data processing environments were significantly associated with greater problems or programmer effectiveness, but with no other problem factor. Product quality was seen as a lesser problem when certain productivity techniques were used in development.

References

[1]

Lientz, B.P., and Swanson, E.B. Discovering issues in software maintenance. Data Management, 16, 10, (Oct 1978), 15-18.

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[2]

Lientz, B.P., and Swanson, E.B. Software maintenance: A user/ management tug-of-war. Data Management, 17, 4, (April 1979), 26-30.

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[3]

Lientz, B.P., and Swanson, E.B. Impact of development productivity aids on application system maintenance. Proceedings of a Conference on Application Development Systems, Data Base, 11, 3, (Winter-Spring 1980), 114--120.

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[4]

Lientz, B.P., Swanson, E.B., and Tompkins, G.E. Characteristics of application software maintenance. Comm. A CM, 21, 6, (June 1978), 466-471.

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Nie, N.H., Hull, C.H., Jenkins, J.G., Steinbrenner, K., and Bent, D.H. SPSS: Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. 2nd Ed., McGraw Hill, New York, 1975.

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Swanson, E.B. The dimensions of maintenance. Proc. 2nd Int. Conf. on Software Engineering. San Francisco, October 13-15, 1976.

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Lientz, B. P., and Swanson, E. B. Software Maintenance Management. Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1980.

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Cited By

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Heričko TŠumak BKarakatič S(2024)Commit-Level Software Change Intent Classification Using a Pre-Trained Transformer-Based Code ModelMathematics10.3390/math1207101212:7(1012)Online publication date: 28-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/math12071012
Bradford MBucy RAdivar M(2024)Implementing ERP with Maintenance and Support in Mind: Exploring the Efficacy of Application Management Services for the Post-Implementation PhaseJournal of Information Systems10.2308/ISYS-2022-06438:2(1-27)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.2308/ISYS-2022-064
Sakthivel S(2023)A critical review of cost-benefit analysis for business software investmentsAmerican Journal of Business10.1108/AJB-09-2022-014538:4(229-247)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2023
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Index Terms

Problems in application software maintenance
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Project and people management
      2. Software management
        Software maintenance
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software development process management
    2. Software post-development issues
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Software configuration management and version control systems

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Published In

Communications of the ACM Volume 24, Issue 11

Nov. 1981

64 pages

ISSN:0001-0782

EISSN:1557-7317

DOI:10.1145/358790

Editor:
Robert L. Ashenhurst
Univ. of Chicago, Chicago, IL

Issue’s Table of Contents

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 November 1981

Published in CACM Volume 24, Issue 11

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Heričko TŠumak BKarakatič S(2024)Commit-Level Software Change Intent Classification Using a Pre-Trained Transformer-Based Code ModelMathematics10.3390/math1207101212:7(1012)Online publication date: 28-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.3390/math12071012
Bradford MBucy RAdivar M(2024)Implementing ERP with Maintenance and Support in Mind: Exploring the Efficacy of Application Management Services for the Post-Implementation PhaseJournal of Information Systems10.2308/ISYS-2022-06438:2(1-27)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.2308/ISYS-2022-064
Sakthivel S(2023)A critical review of cost-benefit analysis for business software investmentsAmerican Journal of Business10.1108/AJB-09-2022-014538:4(229-247)Online publication date: 9-Oct-2023
https://doi.org/10.1108/AJB-09-2022-0145
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Ali SShoaib Zafar MSaeed M(2020)Effort Estimation Problems in Software Maintenance – A Survey2020 3rd International Conference on Computing, Mathematics and Engineering Technologies (iCoMET)10.1109/iCoMET48670.2020.9073823(1-9)Online publication date: Jan-2020
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Abstract

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Cited By

Index Terms

Recommendations

Application software maintenance: can it be controlled?

Influencing factors in outsourced software maintenance

Software maintenance: A budgeting dilemma

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