DefinePK

Abstract

Software maintenance is one of the major part of the software development life
cycle and it cannot be detached from other software development life cycle
process. One of the major concerns of any software maintenance organization
is to analyze, estimate and improve the productivity of maintenance process.
In this paper, both qualitative and quantitative analysis was done through
incremental experiments to improve the maintenance and evolution process for
a particular environment.
The purpose of this research is to present the result of introducing and evaluating
agile process based on Extreme Programming (XP) in a software maintenance
environment for an in house software development team. Prior to introducing
an agile process, an assessment of the organization's software maintenance and
evolution processes was done, to understand what should be introduced and
why. It was difficult to introduce XP in it original appearance to the case
organization, so it is necessary to redesign many of the practices in order for
them to fit the needs of the software maintenance team. After, observing and
examine the existing maintenance process and related issues of the particular
case organization, some agile practices was selected and redesigned to improve
the overall quality and performance of the particular environment.
This research successfully proved that adoption and modification of agile
practices in particular environment improve the overall quality of maintenance
process and overcome the addressed issues of in-house development environment.