System Maintenance Activities Research Articles

The Impact of Modeling Formalisms on Software Maintenance

Maintenance consumes the majority of software's lifecycle resources. Factors affecting the maintenance phase are of practical concern to systems developers and users, but only a few of those factors are under direct control of the project manager. Modeling formalisms are generally touted for their impacts on the development of software; however their impact on maintenance is less discussed and less clear. The question addressed in this research is what impact the choice of modeling formalism has on system maintenance activity. Modeling formalisms are used to capture, analyze and present systems. Major modeling formalisms include process, data, and object-oriented (OO). While process and data formalisms tend to focus more on system processes or data respectively, OO is intended to more evenly balance the treatment of both. Sixty organizations provided data on the use of modeling formalisms across the organization and data on 112 software development projects. The results show how the choice of a modeling formalism has significant differential implications for software maintenance. Despite other research results to the contrary, the results reported here lead us to the conclusion that the choice of an OO modeling formalism had the best impact on maintenance

SCTL-MUS: A Formal Methodology for Software Development of Distributed Systems. A Case Study

Abstract. This paper introduces an iterative model for the software development process of distributed systems. It is based on dealing with the system evolution and maintenance activities as similar stages of the system development. In order to formalise this model, a multi-valued causal temporal logic, referred to as Simple Causal Temporal Logic (SCTL), is defined for the acquisition and specification of the functional requirements. A Model of Unspecified States (MUS) is also defined with a double goal: firstly, to show the fundamental aspects of system behaviour, which has been specified through a set of SCTL requirements; and, secondly, to verify the consistency and completeness of the specified requirements. The combination of SCTL and MUS allows obtaining the specification of the initial architecture of the system formally. Besides, the design decisions are stored with the goal of making the evolution and maintenance tasks easier. The translation between MUS and a constructive formal description technique (LOTOS) is automatic from the definition of architectural operators.

Migrating, Archiving, and Reconstructing Electronic Records in a Regulatory Environment

Information technology and quality assurance professionals in various Food and Drug Administration-regulated industries are seeking advice on how to maintain electronic records and associated computerized systems in compliance with 21 CFR 11. System and record maintenance activities have raised issues with respect to: Migrating electronic records to new systems, archiving electronic records, and reconstructing electronic records in the event of a fraud investigation. Professional societies and industry groups have continued to discuss these issues since 21 CFR 11 was released in its final form in March 1997. This article has been written to present a summarization of some of those discussions.

A Contribution to Integration of HCI Practice with Control System Development

The paper is a part of a series of papers on an integration of HCI practice with a control system development through the dichotomous life cycle model. The dichotomous life cycle model complies with HCI society standpoints. The model makes it possible for a member of a multidisciplinary development team to fully contribute in his area of expertise using adequate methods, techniques and terminology. Furthermore, the model facilitates system maintenance activities and makes a final system more usable. Overall system development time can be reduced by a parallelism embodied in the dichotomous life cycle model.

An enhanced approach for implementing total productive maintenance in the manufacturing environment

Many systems in use today are not performing as intended, nor are they cost effective in terms of their operation and support. Manufacturing systems, in particular, often operate at less than full capacity, productivity is low, and the costs of producing products are high. In dealing with the aspect of cost, experience has indicated that a large percentage of the total cost of doing business is due to maintenance‐ related activities in the factory; i.e. the costs associated with maintenance labour and materials and the cost due to production losses. Further, these costs are likely to increase even more in the future with the added complexities of factory equipment through the introduction of new technologies, automation, the use of robots, and so on. In response to maintenance and support problems in the typical factory environment, the Japanese introduced the concept of total productive maintenance (TPM), an integrated life cycle approach to factory maintenance and support. TPM methods and techniques have been successfully implemented in Japan through the past decade, and more recently in the USA. Inherent within the TPM concept are the aspects of enhancing the overall effectiveness (efficiency) of factory equipment, and providing an optimal group organizational approach in the accomplishment of system maintenance activities. Both the equipment and the organizational sides of the spectrum need to be addressed in fulfilling the objectives of TPM. It is believed that while many successes have been realized in structuring organizations to respond better to the maintenance challenge, very little progress has been made relative to the influence of equipment design for minimal maintenance and support (i.e. the incorporation of reliability, maintainability, and supportability characteristics in design). Briefly addresses this aspect of the problem, identifies some design analysis/evaluation tools that can be used, and recommends an approach for the continuous improvement of manufacturing systems in terms of operation and support.

Dependence directed reasoning and learning in systems maintenance support

The maintenance of large information systems involves continuous modifications in response to evolving business conditions or changing user requirements. Based on evidence from a case study, it is shown that the system maintenance activity would benefit greatly if the process knowledge reflecting the teleology of a design could be captured and used in order to reason about he consequences of changing conditions or requirements, A formalism called REMAP (representation and maintenance of process knowledge) that accumulates design process knowledge to manage systems evolution is described. To accomplish this, REMAP acquires and maintains dependencies among the design decisions made during a prototyping process, and is able to learn general domain-specific design rules on which such dependencies are based. This knowledge cannot only be applied to prototype refinement and systems maintenance, but can also support the reuse of existing design or software fragments to construct similar ones using analogical reasoning techniques.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Function point analysis: difficulties and improvements

The method of function point analysis was developed by A. J. Albrecht (1979) to help measure the size of a computerized business information system. Such sizes are needed as a component of the measurement of productivity in system development and maintenance activities, and as a component of estimating the effort needed for such activities. Close examination of the method shows certain weaknesses, and the author proposes a partial alternative. A description is given of the principles of this Mark II approach. The results are presented of some measurements of actual systems to calibrate the Mark II approach, and conclusions are drawn on the validity and applicability of function point analysis generally.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

The goals of citizenship training : A Hungarian perspective

Political socialization, the process by which individuals, particularly children, learn to internalize their society’s values, is an important part of the system-maintenance activities of all societies. It is accomplished through a variety of structures, both formal and informal, and in all political systems the main objective is to use these structures in the most efficient manner in order to reach the desired goals. In Communist systems, the informal or primary agencies of political socialization are the family, the church, and peer groups, while the secondary or formal agencies are the Party, youth organizations, the schools, the trade unions, the military, and the hobby groups.’ This article concentrates on the purposes, goals, methods, and successes of the current Hungarian Communist government in instilling desired values in the children through one of these agencies, namely the schools. Although some efforts are made to incorporate Communist values before children reach the school age of six, and certainly political education continues after the student graduates from the Hungarian high school at age eighteen, the