An empirical study of the influence of departmentalization and organizational position on software maintenance

  • Authors:

  • Dowming Yeh;Jing-Hwa Jeng

  • Affiliations:

  • National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, Pingtung, 91201, Taiwan;National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, Pingtung, 91201, Taiwan

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Software Maintenance: Research and Practice
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Differences between software development and maintenance imply that software maintenance work should be measured and managed somewhat differently from software development. On the other hand, maintenance programmers frequently perform the same tasks as development programmers do. How to departmentalize maintenance and development is thus becoming an issue. Departmentalization in software development and maintenance can be classified into two categories, maintenance separated from development and maintenance jointly with development. Departmentalization has its strengths and weaknesses. In this work, quantitative empirical methods are applied to investigate the influence of departmentalization on fulfillment opportunity, time allocations of activities, problem occurrences, and management process in software maintenance. Seven hypotheses are formed and tested by statistical methods. The result shows that separate organizations demonstrate specialization in software maintenance, but managerial attitudes also aggravate the potential status difference for such organizations. Other major pitfalls for departmentalization are also identified.