Software Maintainability: Perceptions of EDP Professionals.

Author List: Kim, Chai; Westin, Stu;
MIS Quarterly, 1988, Volume 12, Issue 2, Page 167-185.
Software maintenance continues to be one of the most complex problems facing much of the software industry. This study examines EDP professionals' perceptions of what makes software maintainable. Perceptions were assessed through a series of factor analyses on the data collected from a survey of 149 professionals from 20 organizations of varying sizes. The respondents were asked to rate the relative importance of various features which contribute to the ease of maintenance. Results showed that EDP professionals do not share a common perception of software maintainability: software project managers have different perceptions of what contributes to the ease of maintenance than those who are directly involved in maintenance operations. If those who manage and those who actually maintain software do not, in fact, agree on the importance of maintenance factors, then the maintenance problem is much more complex than EDP professionals or software engineers might have originally thought. Perhaps this is the reason why, according to the survey, EDP professionals are less than optimistic in general about the ability of state-of-the-art approaches to solve the problems of software maintenance.
Keywords: project management; software maintainability; Software maintenance
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List of Topics

#261 0.264 software development maintenance case productivity application tools systems function tool engineering projects effort code developed applications analysis estimation methodology methods
#63 0.163 mis problems article systems management edp managers organizations ;br> data survey application examines need experiences recent organization reports departments oriented
#72 0.161 skills professionals skill job analysts managers study results need survey differences jobs different significantly relative required motivation programmers technical factors
#275 0.102 perceptions attitudes research study impacts importance perceived theory results perceptual perceive perception impact relationships basis significant positive reported common individuals
#285 0.078 effects effect research data studies empirical information literature different interaction analysis implications findings results important set large provide using paper
#29 0.054 industry industries firms relative different use concentration strategic acquisitions measure competitive examine increases competition influence result characteristics mergers industry-level functions