Software maintenance from a service perspective

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the differences between software maintenance and software development from a service point of view, and the consequences for the maturity of software maintenance organizations. We argue that software maintenance can be seen as providing a service, whereas software development is concerned with the development of products. Differences between products and services affect the way in which customers assess their respective quality. Consequently, customers judge the quality of software maintenance differently from how they judge the quality of software development. This in turn implies a need to carry out software maintenance through different processes from those used by the average software development organization. We discuss two overall approaches to achieving a high-quality IT service organization which include these service-specific processes: ITIL and the IT service capability maturity model. ITIL is a set of best practices widely used within the IT service industry. The IT service CMM is a maturity growth model akin to the software CMM. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.