Maintenance-Oriented Design and Development: A Case Study

  • Authors:

  • José Pablo Zagal;Raúl Santelices Ahués;Miguel Nussbaum Voehl

  • Affiliations:

  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Software
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

It is a general consensus that maintenance efforts are the most time and resource consuming of the entire software development process. Maintenance is regarded as the last, and least rewarding, step of software development. We propose a different point of view wherein we shift from the traditional perspective and think of the implementation stage as maintenance as well. This means viewing software development as design followed by maintenance; don't design what will be implemented, but what will be maintained.We present this perspective through an experience in the development of educational video games for children. We use this example to compare both traditional and maintenance-oriented processes, determining the proposed method's benefits and drawbacks in the video game domain. We present and analyze two tools in which the concept of a specific computer-aided software engineering tool (SCASE) is present. These are tools that were designed with maintenance specifically in mind.We conclude that taking into consideration the importance of maintenance, as well as focusing the development process toward it, is a great boon toward the development of software projects that are successful, on time, and on budget.