Lean Maintenance Techniques and Metrics
How can good general management principals be applied to the practice of software maintenance? One model worth looking at is “lean production techniques” as developed in manufacturing and which can be adapted to software maintenance to improve quality and throughput. The basic techniques include: Continuous process improvement Continuous product flow via reasonably sized projects constantly moving through the pipeline Planning for uncertainty by building adaptation to change into the process and plan Focusing on the software being usable and...
read moreInteresting Statistics – Numbers of Programmers in Maintenance vs. Development
In my ongoing effort to educate people about how software maintenance work outweighs development work, here are some interesting numbers about the evolution of software professionals and their work. I found this in a presentation at the International Conference on Software Maintenance 2008, in Beijing a couple months ago. These statistics were in the keynote address by Harry Sneed, ANECON GmbH in Germany, who credited long-time software authority, Capers Jones. Year Pgmrs in Development Pgmrs in Maintenance Percent in ...
read moreInteresting Statistics – Part 2
I’ve been considering adding a feature to Codelyzer to assist with calculating function points (FP) in RPG programs, and as part of that I’ve been reading “Applied Software Measurement, Global Analysis of Productivity and Quality” by Capers Jones. As always, Mr. Jones writes very clearly and provides a great deal of interesting and to the point information. Much of the statistical reporting and analysis in the book is based on the function point unit of measure. (For those of you not familiar with function points, I will write an explanation of them in the near future.) ...
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